Review: Haunted

As much as I am obsessed with movies, sometimes not all of them hit my radar.

Case in point? 1995's Haunted.

Just how a movie starring Aidan Quinn, Kate Beckinsale and Anthony Andrews skirted by me is as much a mystery as this movie is.

Quinn plays David Ash, who's twin sister Juliette accidentally downs as a child growing up in the English country side. His American mother moves him to the States where he grows to become a professor of psychology and spends his time writing books disproving the paranormal and busts fake psychics at seances.

He returns to England to teach at University and keeps receiving requests from an old woman, Mrs. Webb, who insists that she is living with ghosts and implores him to help her. Initially he resists, until his assistant informs him that the woman lives in Edbrook. For some reason, this piques his interest and he travels back to the English country side to convince the old woman that what she thinks are ghosts can be dispelled.

Or is it?

Upon arrival, Ash meets the adult children of the estate Christina (Beckinsale), Robert (Andrews) and Simon (Alex Lowe) who are.. um.. well.. let's just say the word "inappropriate" is an understatement! They're weird.. they think that Mrs. Webb (once their nanny is weird) and poor Professor Ash has everything he knows to be true turned upside down.

Sir John Gielgud also makes an appearance as the formidable Dr. Doyle.

This isn't your typical haunted house movie and there were moments in the film where I actually jumped out of my skin and chocked on my microwave popcorn!

So if you come across this in the 5.99 bin at WalMart, make the investment. It really is a great movie.

Review: The Human Centipede

Um.

Uhhhh......

Yea..

You know how someone tells you that you should watch something and you're all like, ".. yea, cool, I'll have to check it out."

But then someone ELSE immediately responds and says OMG!! DO NOT WATCH IT!!

And then you're all like OMG! I HAVE TO WATCH IT NOW.

Ok..

So the next time that happens to you? RESIST THE URGE! Trust on that one.

Because that's exactly what happened when someone told me to check this movie out and then someone else told me not to because there are things that cannot be "unseen" ... no truer words have been spoken.

I have never seen anything so sick.. or depraved.. or stomach turning.. or so.. so.. so.. omg.. it's just sick.

If you haven't guessed already, this movie is about a doctor who decides to create a human centipede. Think ass to mouth here, not just adding arms or legs to one person. So you have the obligatory young American females trolloping through Germany by themselves.. and yknow.. of course they get lost at night in dense German woods and get a flat tire. There's also a Japanese guy that came from who knows where.. and they all finds themselves down the basement of this doctor's house getting their shit cut up to be all sewn together.

There's a lot of awfully sick shit in here.. literally and figuratively .. so honestly, I'm not going to tell you to watch it,, not going to tell you not to..

I'm only going to say that I warned you!

Review: My Soul To Take

Oh. Em. GEE!!

Sometimes the best movies are the ones that you wouldn't give a second thought to.

This is one of them and if you haven't seen it already then I suggest you go see it NOW.

Where Paranormal Activity 2 took a little over an hour to finally show something quasi-interesting, the first five minutes of My Soul To Take has enough going on to create another handful of movies.

The premise is basic horror / slasher movie fare .. a schizo serial killer goes on a rampage and is believed to be dead after a fiery ambulance accident. Just so happens that seven babies are born at the exact time he has supposedly died.

You knew there had to be a hook, right? There's always a hook.

Now, 16 years later those seven are starting to find themselves on the wrong end of a knife.

Did the killer really die? Did his evil soul implant itself into one of the babies?

You'll have to watch it for yourself because this movie is filled to the gills with SO many W!T!F!!!! moments that I really don't want to give anything away.

I will say that if you enjoy the Freddie's and the Michael Myers .. you will LOVE this one. Sometimes saying that a Slasher movie is intelligent sounds like an oxymoron but not so in this case. Definitely worth the price of the ticket .. large popcorn .. AND hot dog!!

Definitely an all digit thumbs up!!

Review: Paranormal Activity 2

Oh brother.

Where do I begin?

Y'know.. I wasn't a big fan of the first Paranormal Activity. It was a semi-cool premise but I remember thinking at the time that the writer focused on the wrong things and went completely absurd with the whole finding of an exorcism gone bad vlog.

When I saw the trailer for PA2, I figured.. yknow.., that the whole thing with the baby and the dog might.. MIGHT.. have a little promise and maybe.. MAYBE.. the writer would have learned his lesson from the first one and really make an exceptional mind flipping film.

No.,. it's not street drugs I'm smoking.

The movie is only 78 minutes long. By the 60 minute mark, I was ready to dump the popcorn and be on my way because I've never sat through something SO BORING in my life. It was almost painful. The climax happens in the last five minutes and is viewed through what is suppose to be a night vision video camera. Couldn't tell you what the hell happened because nothing made sense.

A few things that could have been interesting but really didn't bridge the gap with anything stronger then Tarzan vines are the facts that this movie is suppose to have been filmed two months prior to the first one .. Micah and Katie make an appearance and his visit is what is suppose to have started his love affair with video taping everything.

Katie is the sister of the movies baby's mama and remember in the first one where Katie supposedly has had a demon following her for all her life? Well.. wouldn't you think that when starts to go hokey she wouldn't be so dismissive of it?

Another weird thing that tried to tie the two movies together is the photo o the little dead relative girl. The one that supposedly burned in a fire? Yea. well.. it shows up here with the same damn line and somewhere at the end someone burns it. Why? Have no idea. Doesn't make sense.

The other randomly bizarre made no sense at all moment happened at the very end. I'm not going to give it away but words flashed up on the screen saying so and so haven't been seen.. but we did see so and so and know where so and so was and know what happened to so and so ... stupid.

Personally, I wouldn't waste my time or money to see this. Well.. unless it was a date and someone else way paying I guess would be ok. But seriously, I wouldn't even through a dollar in Red Box to rent it. Catch it when it comes on a free cable movie channel or something like that 'cause this is really two thumbs AND two toes down

Review: Case 39

Sorry.. but there's nothing like a scary movie and by "scary", I don't mean slasher films or horror movies or Michael Moore movies.

Ok.. so I had to throw that in. Sue me.

I'm talking about movies that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.. hands over your eyes, peeking through your fingers.. The kind of movie that makes you turn on every light in the house when you need to go to the bathroom even though there are four other people, two bark-at-a-leaf dogs, two cats and a whole lot of fish in the house with you.

Before FX became the general method of fright, movie makers used light, shadow and camera angles to put the scare in ya.

Case 39 isn't THAT old school, but it's old school enough to leave an impression.
Renee Zellweger plays a social services case worker who is issued the title's Case 39, a file regarding a tween girl who is suspected of being abused. She takes the case, interviews the parents and leaves with a gut feeling that something just isn't right.

Her attempts to convince her boss and a detective friend that the girl is in danger fall on deaf ears until one night when the girl calls her pleading for help.

In one of THE MOST DISTURBING clips of film I have ever scene in my life, you realize that this movie is going to put both The Exorcist AND The Omen to shame.

I'm not going to go further with the plot because this is a movie that you have to see for yourselves.

Bradley Cooper supports as a child psychologist with romantic interests in Zellweger's character :: worth noting that the two are a couple in real life .. or do you live under a rock? :: and Ian McShane appears as the detective friend.

Jodelle Ferland plays Lilith, the girl at the center of the movie and believe me, she's going to be someone to keep a tag on if she doesn't fall into the Lindsay Lohen mode of child actresses.

Go to the movies to see this one.. hell, spring for a large bucket of popcorn. It's definitely worth it.

Two big thumbs up.