I didn't really expect a good movie as I popped OneChanbara into my DVD player but I mean the cover has a girl with samurai swords, a cowboy hat and she's wearing a bikini. Least this could have been was Japanese Skinemax.
But it turns out OneChanbara, which is based on a PS2/Xbox game wasn't a Versus like zombie movie or Japanese hentai. It turned out to be some low end, cash in video game movie that was probably directed by the Japanese Uwe Boll.
Egads.
So who is this girl on the cover? Her name is Aya, some mystical assassin with kick ass sword skills that by pressing "X" alot with "square" enables her to slaughter the attacking zombie hordes. She's got a fat fuck Japanese guy with her that plays as comic relief and Reiko, a shot gun toting zombie renegade.
Mission wise, they go from setting to setting killing zombies until they reach Dr. Sugita and his protege Saki (who is Aya's sister). Various hadoukens later, she kills her sister and they ride into the zombie filled sunset.
Yawn.
The girl on the cover was mute for most of the movie and oddly wasn't hot as I thought she was gonna be. Also, you've got your standard Sailor Moon schoolgirl outfits, zombies who use weapons and various goofy CGI.
I haven't seen a good Japanese zombie in a while and had low expectations for this but I'm eager to get our next good Japanese zombie movie. You listening Japan? Get to it.
Rating:
1/2 a
Here's the trailer.
Wow these video game trailers have more skin than the movie....
[This is a review I wrote for UGO.com hence the different format of the review.]
Believe it or not, this is the 2nd movie I’ve seen where a Caucasian American blonde is married to a Chinese American guy and has to deal with Chinese mythos gone awry (the first movie was They Wait). Well 2 movies counts as a subgenre right? It’s this new subgenre that Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of The Blair Witch Project has decided to make his 3rd film since the BWP made him a household name.
To sum up the very brief plot, Melissa (Amy Smart) and Yul (Tim Chiou) are a newly married couple who decide to take their honeymoon in China during the worst time….well ever. Because during the seventh lunar month according to an ancient Chinese myth, the gates of hell and the dead are freed to roam among the living. After a walking tour of a festival, their tour guide Ping abandons them in the middle of Nowhere, China. You’d think a country filled with a billion people would not have any nowheres. But you’d be wrong.
Soon they are chased by ghostlike creatures that have already attacked a few of the unsuspecting strangers who have ended up lost in this town. As they go searching for a place to hide it’s not too long until we find out why this is all happening to our American couple.
The first thing you notice is that Eduardo Sanchez hasn’t spared us from the shaky cam feel he developed from the Blair Witch Project. It’s ever evident within Seventh Moon as most of the film is eerily similar to the Blair Witch Project in many ways. We have a relationship going through the strainer through a supernatural ordeal. We also get lots and lots of chase scenes. The chases are handheld nauseous ness to the extreme but it works 30% of the time. The blurred out glimpses of our Descent like creatures add to the atmosphere of backwoods China under a starry night.
Sanchez also implements the “how are they going to escape this situation” scenarios as both Yul and Melissa have to escape from would be dead ends that would seem to lead to certain death. From a head lit runaway drive in desolate fields to an abandoned farmhouse to being trapped in a car as the creatures move in, all are tense moments filled with jump scare-o-thons and panic filled moments of suspense.
Both Chiou and Smart are decent would be victims, though a little back-story of the couple would have established some need for the audience to care about our newlyweds. Smart’s Melissa is a tough as nails final girl while her husband plays the dude in distress motif to the max. That little role reversal was a little neat. But between their dialogue of grit vs. give up, Smart whines and yells and actions are actually spoken (a big no no in film)
But Seventh Moon is a grind that you have to have the stomach to go through. The grind eventually ends up weak towards the end. As menacing as these ghost like human creatures are, they don’t have the evilest evil I would have thought we would get.
Also, the Chinese mythos is something inherent in Asian culture that somehow we American audiences cannot grasp. Thus, we don’t get scared easily by hordes of monster demons slaughtering animals and such. Finally, gorehounds won’t rejoice as there isn’t anything to write in the splatter wikia though the FX and makeup done by Hong Kong’s Spectral Motion are top notch.
Seventh Moon is a change of pace from your death knocking on your door or slasher slice-a-rama and it has some genuine moments of eerie spooky. But it’s no Blair Witch and unfortunately the comparisons are something we can’t overlook.
Grade: C
You'll like it if....
You’ll watch any movie Amy Smart is in
You love C-horror with a twist of American horror
You love shaky cam and Blair Witch style cinema
You won't like it if....
You get nauseous watching shaky cam
You hate slow burn, jump scares and lots of running around
It wasn't too long ago I was blogging about Nazi zombies.
After the flick was getting mega hype from Sundance film festival, you knew this was gonna be one of those horror films that just gets it. It wasn't trying to appeal to the PG-13 millenials so Hollywood could $ca ching. Dead Snow was appealing to the horror-sphere and won the Nazi zombie race against Worst Case Scenario and others.
Wirkola's previous film was a Norwegian parody of Kill Bill so what we get with our Nazi zombies are some ha ha moments that seem right for a flick about an undead German army fighting against a group of medical student hipsters.
I missed seeing it at NYC Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.Well I'm glad the IFC picked it up for VOD and DVD distribution.
It's a horror film that's self aware. It knows it's premise and makes note of it. It's also follows the standard formula to a tee. Dead Snow makes no allusions of not being a horror comedy. Wanna see younglings get slaughtered my blood hungry, ravenous zombies? You got it!
The twist is we're seeing Nazi zombies in the mountains of Norway running in the snow.
And that's so completely nutty, you have to applaud this snowy D-day of destruction.
Boring Plot-O-Matic The plot of the film is set around a group of Norwegian medical students who go away for an Easter vacation in a cabin up in the mountains. Unfortunately, the area they are staying in was used by the Nazis in the German occupation of Norway during World War II. The Germans raped and pillaged the locals and stole all their gold, until the locals chased the Germans up the mountains, where they supposedly froze to death. The medical students find a box of gold in the cabin they are staying in, which had belonged to the Germans. As a result, zombie Germans come back to reclaim their gold, with deadly results.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
We are going to use the "what makes a good slasher movie" list for Dead Snow. Just because, if I do a regular review it will probably be boring whereas answering my own questions is funtastic!
Does Dead Snow achieve everything on this list?
1.) Is there a mysterious, insanely strong, ridiculed as a child, deformed, inbred redneck slasher?
Let's replace slasher with a shitload of zombies.
We get the meanest, great makeup FX of full fledge SS Nazi zombies complete with WWII gear and some decomposing Skeletor corpse faces. These are top notch looking zombies. And the fact that they are semi self aware, 3% intelligent and run after our snow mobiling yipsters is a testament to their army training.
2.) Gratuitous, over the top, super fleshy nudity (with Grade A boobage)?
We get our standard sex scene in a frigid outhouse. And you know the rule. If you get some, you get dead.
3.) Stereotypical teenage caricatures who die gruesome and horrific over the top deaths?
Oh man. They so die such awesome over the top deaths. It's not a spoiler in a sense that you know that most of these people have to get bloodified and slaughtered so us gorehounds can rejoice. So lets meet our would be victims!
1.) Vegard (our X-games extreme sporter) 2.) Roy (our horny horndog) 3.) Erlend (our resident horror movie geek) 4.) Martin (our doctor who is scared of blood) 5.) Liv (our hot blonde) 6.) Hanna (GF of Martin, pseudo final girl) 7.) Chris (hot chick, mostly fodder)
Erlend is the first to make the observation that a bunch of good looking Norwegians are headed to the scary cabin in the mountains where evil will probably ensue. It's clever enough to make a reference to their situation is a horror staple and his Braindead t-shirt at least homages the great old school Peter Jackson. 4.) No Plot?
Check.
5.) Kills by our slasher that make you go "Fuck yeah!"
Check. I was rather impressed by some of the gore and splatter. See below.
6.) Gore, lots of it. Like serious decapitation, dismemberment, impalement, frenzy steroid rages and blood shooting out at various penetration wounds, limbs a flailing and mindless splatter and mayhem
Check. Dead Snow combined gallons of blood, intenstines, gore, splatter and CGI blood splatter and *Gasp!* made it work.
Here is your Gore-ipedia.
1.) Ocular trauma with special head brain explosion 2.) Head decaps (x infinity!) 3.) Gratuitous intenstine trauma 4.) Chainsaw arm surgery 5.) Body rippage 6.) Sliced throats 5.) Zombie ocular trauma 6.) Zombie Arm trauma 7.) Zombie shotgun trauma 8.) Zombie intensine trauma ...suffice it to say the zombies get chainsawed, scythed, knifed and obliterated in various splatter happy ways.
And there's like an never ending army, so there's solid carnage throughout.
7.) Geeky leader who takes charge of the hapless group as they try to escape who befriends a hot girl who knows about the "legend" (there's always a legend no one believes) Geeky leader does take charge. And we get our mysterious old man who describes the spooky legend (see the plot above)
8.) Funny yet ill timed dialogue but also various quips and one liners that are funny only the first time around (yet somehow funny again when you buy the DVD and only when you're stoned)
Check. Very Evil Dead and Brain Dead-y
9.) Final girl goes all final girly?
Final man?!?!?
10.) Wildly ambigious ending that can be used to warrant a sequel?
You betcha! Nude-ipedia
Nada
WTF moment Nazi Zombies working together to rip the arms and limbs of one of the hipsters
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
That scene of Nazi zombies coming out of the snow and the one where they are fuckin Usain Bolting is fuckin priceless.
Dead Snow will inevitably be compared to Evil Dead and Brain Dead (both films they reference and homage). It's got the ill timed humor working well (and even though it was subtitled, it worked, see the subtitled version and not the dubbed one). It's funny and makes you know it.
Let's get straight to the point. Dead Snow is one of the best horror movies of 2009. The movie takes a while to get revved up, with the first 30 minutes full of quick scares but the characters are not overtly annoying and do enough to make sure when they get dead, you have a good time watching their demise.
But as the first movie to put Nazi zombies in the snow on screen, Dead Snow hits all the right targets, makes you laugh and is just like storming Normandy.
All we see is tons of carnage, slaughter and splatter.
But you can't look away. And honestly, you don't want to because it's too fuckin awesome to watch.
The indie scene seems to not be affected by the recession. Well it could be the fact that these type of movies have miniscule budgets that any relative profit they make is a plus.
So its interesting to see directors and writers try different things. In the case of Infected (now called Dark Island), it looks like they're going for a sci-fi/horror/action mish mash of Lost meets the Signal. From the looks of the trailer, we've got a smoke monster, infected sicko killers and an island were deadly government experiments have gone wrong (Dharma anyone?)
Plus we got some search and rescue commandos who you know are not all gonna make it out alive.
You know what we Americans do best? Make a frakin kick ass zombie film.
Score another one for the US of A. USA! USA!
Gregg Bishop's uber indie Dance of Dead rivals Shaun of the Dead's silliness, blends in some 80s Return of the Dead for the millienial age and clicks in some Buffy-logue to boot. It's amazing nobody ever thought to make Buffy but with zombies.
It's a blender of geekiness heroes without the superpowers and makes the sci fi club cool.
And so Dance of the Dead entertainment value has inappropriate language, gore and scenes of violence. Huuuuaaaaaaaa!
Boring Plot-O-Matic
A high school prom is unexpectedly interrupted when a graveyard, next to a nuclear power plant, becomes the sudden source of resuscitated cadavers. As zombies march on the high school, a motley group of dateless teenage outcasts take on the zombies and save the day.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
Geeks are 8.7 on the coolness meter. Maybe you didn't get the memo. So our rag tag group of misfits all have that Buffy-ish character mish mash to them. Jimmy our detention anarchist (ala Buffy) and his girl sqeuaky clean Lindsey (Angel?) are joined by Gwen (our Cordelia like cheerleader) and Steven the Xander in love with her.
We got some Willows as well in the form of our Sci Fi club (Jules, George and Rod) and a Giles in the embodiment of a redneck coach. A pseudo Blink 182 band (Dingoes ate my Baby anyone?) complete our contingent. All seem in their dance-verse element, meshing in with their own uniqueness, which I have to say would have been trouble if we the audience didn't like our heroes and heroines.
This is definitely millenial zombie movie for the Generation Y universe. And its damn good. The quips, dialogue and converfunnies are all relatively timed perfect. Massive zombie horde about to attack? Lets jam out and have a prom dance to remember.
The "gear up" weapons montage echoes Raimi and Romero like homages stay true to the maestro.
It's funny and its proud to be it.
As for the zombies, we've got fast movers, slow movers. Take your pick. They all end up gunshot, bashed in and pummeled into slosh. The gore and splatter are in epic form. If CGI was done, it was not noticeable. Bishop and his crew did their zombie homework.
Like a BTVS episode, its tick tocking and it works well. Dance of the Dead is a tour de force of a zombie comedy done uber cool, and LOLing at all the right moments.
Even George could use some pointers from this flick.
Gore-ipedia (if you want to be shocked don't read)
Zombie bashing in all forms (gunshots, decaps, arm and leg rips, etc.) Ax slicing Spine ripping Gunshot head shots Lots of offsceen crange hijinks
Nude-ipedia (because you like boobies)
Some cheerleader cheering (but full frontal boobies, err nada)
WTF moment
A zombie makeout session. That's a first!
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
For all the shitty POV zombie flicks and other zombie reimaginings, a Dance of the Dead comes along and blows you away.
It's a horror comedy that establishes a zombie-verse, makes sure we're entertained by our main characters and unleashes slayerville on the undead.
The ending hints on a possible sequel, and Dance will probably spawn mucho zombie-omedies that will not be as clever.
So if your looking for a decent BTVS fix, put down the season 8 comic and watch Dance of the Dead. And you'll see the sci fi club and anarchist cliques in a whole new light.
I know I'm a little late on this one, but alas I've been hyping up Nazi zombies for some time here. Worst Case Scenario (a movie that seems like it will never be made) had an awesometastic trailer featuring underwater Nazi zombie ghouls.
But Dead Snow, recently announced as part of the lineup for the Sundance Film Festival looks like it's going to be a a uber revolution of zombie horror.
Nazis and zombies is a natural fit in the evil, fucked up sorta way. And its fitting, some Norwegian X-Gamer teenagers get slaughtered by SS decomposing corpses.
The trailer really is quite intriguing. Check it out below.
I noticed:
1.) A Braindead and Indiana Jones references 2.) The local who warns the teens of impending danger 3.) Gratuitous nudity and sex 4.) Fast moving zombies (well fuck, I mean they are dead Nazis) 5.) Total gratuitous Evil Dead/Sam Raimi homage 6.) CGI blood 7.) An actually funny one liner
That scene of Nazi zombies coming out of the snow and the one where they are fuckin Usain Bolting is fuckin priceless.
Eduardo Sanchez (who directed The Blair Witch Project) stayed under the underground radar as nobody noticed his last film, Altered.
But I'm sure everybody will notice his new film, Seventh Moon, as the tagline alone has given me fanboy chills:
"On the full moon of the seventh lunar month, the gates of hell open and the spirits of the dead are freed to roam among the living.”
Seventh Moon stars the super hot Amy Smart and Tim Chiao as newlyweds who attend the Hungry Ghost Festival in rural China. They soon find themselves stranded at night in the middle of a superstitious ritual that may be more real than folk legend.
I really should step away from the genre for a while. But with the Day of the Dead remake out as well as Zombie Strippers, I decided to view Automaton Transfusion.
Well that wasn't a good idea.
Straight out of the Dimension Extreme label, and hyped on the dvd cover as "One of the best zombie films in decades" by Bloody Disgusting, I figured it was worth a try.
The thing about Steven Miller's $30,000 indie horror flick, is that its a $30k flick. And it's got fast moving zombies which I absolutely hate.
So those 2 things just doomed this from the beginning.
Plot-o-matic tell us that 3 high school friends, Chris, Scott and Tim are heading to the city to see a rock band when their town in Florida goes all Romero. Zombies are rampant (no explanation for this at all until the end - which begs the question why tell us the plot at the end of the FRAKIN movie?).
The zombies are on the move attacking the residents of Whatever City, USA. The gore and splatter are top, over the top and beyond infinity awesome. A scene where a girl's jaw is ripped apart is gorely, brilliantly executed and a scene of ocular trauma is a great homage to Master Fulci.
There is an Evil Dead moment which climaxes the movie and the end blatantly boasts a To Be Continued establishing a most definite sequel.
Most of these moments and scenes are well done for an amateur film school production. With a bigger budget I see this crew doing some good things.
But alas, for Automaton Transfusion, the lack of good acting, any suspenseful scenes of mass zombies and gun shots that look like over zealous paintballs rounds make it MST3K worthy.
Even at 80 minutes, its still too long.
Kudos to the effort but I've seen countless zombie movies do what AT does. And unless you put zombies in some new location I've never seen before, it's been there, done that.
I really really need to stop watching zombie movies.
OneChanbara
