Final Destination 2

Oh wow, blue faces in a row. How original.

2003

Directed by: David R. Ellis

Starring: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, James Kirk (hey, isn't that the Star Trek guy?), and
Tony Fucking Todd!!!!!!!

J-Rock's Review:

















Better than the first. This flick was pretty damn good - it had lots of funny parts, pretty hot chicks, some quick boobs, and the best death scenes I've seen in a long time!

I'm assuming you know the premise from the first flick, so if you don't, then my only suggestion is to eat me. Or rent it. The second one starts out with a bang - a HUGE traffic pileup, full of death, music, explosions, and soccer moms. Ok, no soccer moms; we should only be so lucky. The only thing worse than a soccer mom in a minivan? A soccer mom in a fucking Escalade or Expedition! Do these broads really need V-8 engines, 4-wheel-drive, and the cargo capacity of an aircraft carrier just to take their little shit-nosed kids to day care, swim class, and the supermarket?

Anyway, some chick has a premonition about this accident and blocks the highway on-ramp, and thus saves a bunch of people from the Grim Reaper's scythe. You know the rest - death catches up with each one, but there are 2 twists in this movie. These are small spoilers, so scroll down quickly if you don't want to know anything about the movie - first, the sole survivor from the first movie, played by the ever-fucking-hot Ali Larter


















is coaxed out of retirement (actually out of a psych institute) to help this new batch of death-dodgers. Second, each of the people who were spared on the highway were somehow saved once before, and each instance resulted from the death of someone from the first flick. Kind of a cool chain-reaction story they set up.

As for the awesome death scenes - oh man, they cooked up some gory, bloody-ass shit for this movie. Now I don't mean nasty gore like in a zombie flick, but death does its dirty deeds in a clever, evil fashion. Just as an example, one kid is flattened/splattered by a huge pane of glass. Cool visual, huh?

Plus, this movie features TONY TODD!! CANDYMAN!!!! Tony plays a creepy cremator...crematorator...crematororium...the guy who cremates John Does from the hospitals. I think. I don't remember that scene too well, and I don't remember him from the first movie, but it doesn't matter, because he's TONY TODD!!!

So even though F.D. 2 falls into the whole teen-oriented Miramax/Dimension genre, right down to the bluish faces on the box, it's worth checking out, mostly for the death scenes.

IMDb: Final Destination 2

Darkness Falls

2003
Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman (who?)
Starring: No one worth mentioning

J-Rock's Review:








I saw this movie when it came out back in dark, cold January of '03, but I haven't had a chance to update the good 'ol webpage lately. Not that you've been missing much - this movie sucked! People gush over it like it's the second coming of Hitchcock, but it's just a bad, boring movie. I mean, how scary is your movie really going to be when the villian is the Tooth Fairy?

Yeah, you read that right - the "scary" monster in this flick is the Tooth Fairy. It seems that in the town of Darkness Falls (get it?), a nice old lady used to give kids ca$h for the teeth they lost, so when two kids disappear, the first person the townsfolk accuse and immediately hang is the nice old lady. Whatever happened to due process??? I mean at least call Sam Waterston to prosecute the poor lady!

Anyway, the lady puts a curse on the town, blah blah blah, then comes back like a hundred years later to unleash a killing spree on some random people in the town. Why now? Why them? I don't know. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention (or I just didn't care) that the lady had been burnt by a house fire, and had to wear a porcelain mask just to go in the sunlight, so when she comes back as a demon-thingy, she has a mask and can only kill someone when they are enveloped by darkness.

Anyway again, she kills some people, then some guy destroys her with fire. And then we left the theater and walked into another movie. I don't remember what movie though.

Oh yeah, don't see Darkness Falls.

I'm not happy about it, but here's the customary IMDb link: Darkness Falls

Ghost Ship

2002

Directed by: Steve Beck

Starring: The chick from ER and the guy from End of Days

J-Rock's Review:
of 5 skulls




Not bad, not unbelievably awesome...just a scary spooky matinee type of horror flick.

It's about an ocean liner that's been lost for 40 years, and has just been found adrift in the Bering Strait by a salvage crew. They come on board, and then things start getting freaky. The chick from ER sees a little girl who's obviously a ghost; a couple of guys start chowing down on what seems like perfectly preserved canned food, but turns out to be yummy, nutritious maggots; and there are some cool deaths along the way.

This flick is worth a rental - you even get some quick boobies about halfway through!

For more information from the IMDb: Ghost Ship

feardotcom

2002

Directed by: the same asshole who directed The House on Haunted Hill

Starring: Stephen Dorff and some other poor saps

J-Rock's Review:
This is a total waste of time, money and film.

Original Review:
I thought it was impossible to make a movie worse than the afore-mentioned House on Haunted Hill. But this idiot succeeded.

This movie had a stupid story, horrible acting, dizzying cinematography and an awful style. Every scene takes place in faux Art-Deco rooms, like the entire city is back in the 1940s. And it's always raining - very fucking annoying.

As for the story, some sicko is running a live-webcam death site where he tortures and kills nubile young ladies. And the police can't find him. And anyone who looks at the site dies within 24 hours, at the hands of the first woman who died, who has apparently become some sort of electrical impulse (cough*Lawnmower Man*cough). The worst part is that every time someone logs on to the site, the movie enters a nauseating sequence of flashes and spins that don't scare you, but instead make you want to punch the director.

Anyway, they find him, and then they log him onto the site, so the dead chick kills him (finally!).
We didn't even see a double feature that night, because there was nothing else worth seeing. Hollywood sucks.

Addendum, added October 25, 2002:
Another thing that makes this movie suck really really bad is that it totally rips off The Ring. I saw the Japanese original, and even though it was dubbed off of a PAL video-disc and subtitled in both Cantonese and English, the movie was really cool. But feardotcom sucked all the suspense out of the movie for me. Fucking Stephen Dorff. I'm glad Blade kicked your ass.

For more information from the IMDb: feardotcom

Halloween: Resurrection

2002

Directed by: I don't care

Starring: I really don't care - except for Daisy McCrackin, the hot redhead who shows her boobs (briefly, but they're nice, and hey, they're boobs)


J-Rock's Review:
Not as bad as Jason X, but still less enjoyable than a colonoscopy

I can't believe I spent money to see another shit-fest horror sequel.

One saving grace is that we saw Reign of Fire as the second half of the double feature, which cleansed the palate of the first movie.

Halloween: Resurrection sucked from beginning to end. First there's a scene stolen from T2 where Jamie Lee Curtis is in a mental hospital and Michael Myers shows up and kills her. During this scene you find out how Michael survived the last flick, when he was clearly decapitated - it was the wrong guy!!! Bum-bum-buuummmm!! Turns out Mikey took a paramedic's uniform and put his mask on the paramedic (cough*SilenceoftheLambs*cough), so Laurie Lee Strode hacked off the paramedic's head instead of her baby brother's.

The premise of the movie is also stupid as shit - six college students are selected to go into Michael's old house to see if anything is amiss (cough*MTV's Fear*cough) This would almost be interesting if they didn't cut every two seconds to a "webcam" perspective, where you can't see shit. Nothing scary happens, Michael chases them around, kills a bunch, and through all this shit, it turns out Michael was tortured and abused as a kid, and that's why he turned nutso. What a way to totally destroy the mythology behind a character. Total 2002 sensitive-psychotherapy-bullshit: everything bad happens because Mommy and Daddy weren't nice to him. What a crock. What's next? Freddy turned evil because a priest cornholed him as a kid?
And of course at the end, when you think MM was burnt to a crisp, his eyes open and the movie ends. Great, another fucking sequel.

The one positive I can take from this movie is that if some assholes can get this pile of crap produced, then there's hope for me to get my dream horror flick produced.

Don't see this movie - spend the money on porn instead.

For more information from the IMDb: Halloween: Resurrection

Drive-In Massacre

1976

Directed by Stu Segall

Starring: some pasty, ugly 70s people who I hope are very ashamed of themselves

J-Rock's Review:
THIS MOVIE IS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF CRAP SINCE BLOODSTALKERS

I don't even know where to begin on this movie. Let me first state that this was another wonderful purchase from the $2 table at Video Update. That fact, plus the half inch of dust that the box had collected from having NEVER been touched, should have given me some idea as to what I was getting myself into. But nooooooooo....nothing can prepare you for the torture that is...Drive-In Massacre.

The first two minutes consist of a very very very very long and slow pan across an empty drive-in theater, which actually becomes partially obscured by a big black blotch covering the left side of the screen (which I should really be thankful for - anything that keeps you from seeing any part of this movie is a blessing). Then comes a laborious 10-minute scene combining the unbridled terror of cars pulling into the drive-in and the spine-tingling suspense of the OPENING CREDITS!!! Then the movie (at the drive-in) rolls, two people start to make out, but then the guy wants to hear the movie, so he reaches out to grab the speaker-thing. He takes about five minutes to stretch to reach it, so you know he's just waiting for death, which inevitably comes in the form of decapitation by sword. Then his woman (actually a very bad plastic stand-in) gets it through the neck.

Enjoy that crappy bloodbath folks, because if you're in this for the long haul with J-Rock, that's the last action you're going to get for a while...

The local police question the manager of the movie theater and the um, well, um, special guy who cleans up the parking lot. This 6 1/2 hour scene is made even more painful by someone's apparent brainiac decision to run an industrial fan in the background, making the dialogue nearly inaudible (don't get me wrong, that's a good thing). It turns out later that the manager and the cleaner guy were both carnies - one was a sword-swallower and one was a knife-thrower...plot point??? Hmm....?

It just gets worse from here, and I'm not going to give a full recap because, frankly, this movie isn't worth the time, so here's a quick run-through: more people get killed, the police think it's the cleaner guy, then they think it's the local peeping tom (complete with a house full of porn), then they think it's the manager. At some point in all this mess, they get a call that someone is running around a warehouse with a machete, and this results in an unnecessary and idiotic chase scene through the warehouse during which the suspect guy magically alternates between having a machete and a gun. They shoot him, and his hostage reveals that she is his daughter, and he had just escaped that morning from a mental institution. Fuck, this movie sucks.

The movie ends soon after this without them finding the killer, and over the final shot, they put up titles that say something about the killer still being on the loose at drive-ins across the country and blah blah blah, and then you hear a voice that's supposed to be your theater manager saying that there's a killer in the theater, and not to panic. Now I give them some credit for this - they actually thought that people would still be in the theater at this point.
This pile of horse shit is a serious competitor with Invasion of the Blood Farmers for worst of all time. I would literally pay money to have that 90 minutes of my life back. I can't believe that anyone involved with this actually thought they were making a good movie.

To prove this movie exists, check out the IMDb: Drive-In Massacre

Cheerleader Camp

1988

Directed by: John Quinn
Starring: Betsy Russell as Alison, Playboy Playmate and porn superstar Teri Weigel as Pam, Lucinda Dickey as Corey, and LEIF FRIGGIN' GARRETT as Brent (no joke!!)

J-Rock's Review:








Ah, the glorious 80s. The decade where horror movies abounded, snorting "crank" was cool, and Ally Sheedy had a job.

Back in that fun decade, Hollywood just pumped out stupid slasher horror flicks and sequels upon sequels.

The main differences between then and now are when a horror movie gets made today, nine times out of ten it has the following qualities:

1. It stars Matthew Lillard.
2. The poster is blue and black with the stars' heads aligned in a V.
3. It stars Noxzema girl.
4. There is no gore.
5. There is no nudity -- an unforgivable crime in my book.
6. It stars Buffy Michelle Gellar.
7. It sucks.

But back to the 80s. These years were truly the golden age for crappy slasher flicks. One of these was Cheerleader Camp. The title basically explains it all, but I'll elaborate for the sake of making this an interesting website...here goes: a bunch of cheerleaders go to camp to learn new stuff and have a competition or something.

All of these cheerleaders have big hooters.

Except one. And that's why she's a mascot, with the big fake head and all.

This makes her INSANELY jealous of the big-hootered cheerleaders, and thus she decides to kill them all.

But thankfully not before we see lots of gratuitous hooters.

The killing in this flick isn't too bad either, and there are actually some pretty funny scenes, too.

I'd definitely recommend this one, but not if your girlfriend or your mom is around, and especially not if your girlfriend IS your mom (so you southerners are out).

Let's end this review before it gets any stupider. Oh yeah, there's a sequel called, you got it, Cheerleader Camp II!! I'll let you know when I see it!

For more from the IMDB: Cheerleader Camp