Curse of Chucky (2013) review by the Director

 

Hi I’m Chucky:

Nica a paraplegic, Is morning the untimely death of her mother. A large package comes in the mail. Nica’s sister and family come to visit and morn with her. The package contains a large red haired doll.

Wanna play:

Nica’s sister Barb arrives with her daughter Alice, Nica’s cute little niece, her husband Ian, the nanny Jill, a smoking hot runway blonde, and a priest Father Frank a friend of the family.
Nica decides to give the Doll to Alice as a present. Ian remembers the popular “Good Guys” dolls from the 1980s. He thinks it’s harmless and cute. Little Alice immediately loves the doll. Barb thinks it’s creepy.

Barb is not a likable character. It isn’t until you find out a secret about her later in the movie that you like her. She wants Nica to sell the valuable estate. She explains she needs her share of the profits.

Nica doesn’t want to. She has stayed in the house her whole life and she is kind of a shut in anyway, handicapped from birth, and likes living there. Barb is frustrated, her business isn’t doing well, and Ian has been reduced to working at Starbucks. Interestingly they can still afford a $400 a week live in Nanny Jill. This becomes clear later in the movie. I won’t spoil it for you.

As the movie progresses quickly it becomes all about Chucky.

He keeps disappearing or showing up in strange places. Everyone assumes Alice is playing with him, setting it up. Though it get’s weirder and weirder, it has the Amityville Horror and Poltergeist angle going for it. Only the girl talks to Chucky. And oh the things he tells her, my, my, where did she learn to talk like that?

It doesn’t take long for the killing to start. There isn’t much build up. Chucky offs Father Frank with Rat Poison in Act one! After a couple deaths Nica figures out what Chucky is.

I felt there wear far too few characters in this movie. I was sad to see them die off so fast. Usually in a serial killer slasher like this you expect some build up, but Curse of Chucky takes about ten minutes and things get going.

So the whole second half of the movie is tedious. The final act is this long explanation. This is where the story is revealed. Usually a movie plays out and the clues to the climax are peppered into the story. In this Chucky installment we get Chucky in the mail, he kills all the ephemeral cast, then the third act is the entire plot of the movie explained by Chucky in flash backs. It’s not exactly like this, I might be a tad over simplifying it. Though this is how it will feel.

Acting: Fiona Dourif (Nica) carries most of the movie. She is a good actress. Kind of like an Anne Hathaway clone. Danielle Bisutti (Barb) is fun to watch. I think she was the highlight for me. Brad Dourif (Chucky) was decent. Dourif is an Oscar winner for his role  in ‘One flew over the Coukoos Nest.’ His role here is not Oscar worthy. I guess Fiona is his daughter? He not only does Chucky’s voice but he also plays him. I kept thinking of him as the Police chief in Rob Zombie’s Halloween. I liked his role in that movie better, he was great. He is a good actor, his role as the guy who becomes Chucky in this movie seemed silly to me.

Gore:

Death by electrocution (I want to make something clear, for fans and movie makers. It is possible to die from a wall socket, but it’s not that easy. Certain variables come into play, like amperage, etc. I’m not an engineer, but I think I’m right in saying electrocutions in movies are way oversimplified.), death by fall (weak), stabbed in the eye, eye pops out, nasty leg wound, awesome car wreck decapitation with fountianous blood spray from the neck. Gorehounds will not be satisfied but what is feed up here.

Nudity: Nothing! And this movie had several good looking women in it!  We have to settle for Maitland McConnell (Jill) looking fine in her Victoria Secret bra and panties.

Directing: Don Mancini (Director), this guy must live and breath all things Chucky.

He is like the George Lucas of Child’s Play. He has written all the Childs Play movies, some of their screen plays, and this is his first time directing one. I think his directing is good. Looks like the movie had a hefty budget.

I do like this shot, well done!

Nothing bad with most of the directing, but I didn’t enjoy the pacing and the story. The story moved too fast and treated us at the end like we were second graders.

Playtimes over:

Not really, this movie leaves it wide open, like sloppy seconds, for more squeals (Child’s Play 7?). We even get a special guess star at the end.

I was wistfully wondering if this would be a decent movie. It let be down, though gently. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before from Child’s Play. I wish I could spoil the movie for you. There is a good dynamic in Barb’s family that I really enjoyed and I didn’t see it coming. That was some good writing by Don Mancini. Unfortunately as soon as it’s revealed a character dies and we don’t get to enjoy any of it playing out! It’s really the only redeeming value to the movie. Maybe the producers ruined that, I don’t know.

If you have time to kill and you’re a Child’s Play fanatic, Cure of Chucky might be worth checking out. It’s absolutely worth seeing if you are a Child’s Play fanatic. Are their Child’s Play fanatics out there?

It’s up to you if you…

-The Director

Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) -review by Rabid Fox

 

Texas Chainsaw (2013)

I’m usually hesitant to check out sequels, especially ones that occur years or decades after the original. I’d seen the reboot Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the prequel to the reboot, and though they were okay, I didn’t think they were as good as the original Tobe Hooper TCM. This 2013 flick was a direct sequel to that original Hooper film and I was surprised to end up enjoying this sequel.

In the beginning…

The opening credits provide a quick recap of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre all the way up to the iconic escape by the lone survivor (um, spoilers I guess?) and the classic image of Leatherface waving his chainsaw around.

                    Chainsaw light saber

The sequel opens immediately after, with the survivor recounting her horrific experience to local Texas police. After hearing about the tragedy, a local posse decides they’ve let the weird Sawyer clan go about their creepy ways for too long and decide to enact some vigilante justice by burning down the residence.

The Sawyer family that inhabits that house of horrors has a brief and bloody shoot-out with the posse that doesn’t end well for the family.

The scene recalls some of the imagery from Rob Zombie’s Devil’s Rejects and the scene even uses the ever-excellent Bill Moseley to portray one of the original TCM cast AND we see Gunnar Hansen (the original Leatherface) make a cameo in that showdown scene as well!

 

As the house burns down, the posse rummages through the wreckage of the house to ensure there are no survivors; one of the group members, Gavin, comes across a surviving Sawyer family woman and her infant daughter. Gavin kills the mother and picks up the baby, bringing her to his wife who is excited to have and raise a baby of her own.

Cut to…

Years later and the little girl, Heather, is working as a meat cutter at a grocery store and we’re quickly introduced to her boyfriend, Heather’s slutty girlfriend who has eyes on the boyfriend, and a couple of other friends who are planning a road trip to New Orleans – fun!

As Heather is making travel plans she is contacted about the death of a grandmother in Texas she never knew existed and this also clues her in to being adopted.

The grandmother has left her a sizable estate and Heather asks to detour the group’s trip so she can claim the inheritance.

Along the way they also pick up a nice-looking, charming hitchhiker who asks for a lift to Louisiana. Then the group arrives at baller Texas mansion. So here’s where most people would be like “hey, I guess finding out I was adopted ain’t so bad, look at this awesome mansion I get as a prize!” Don’t worry, I was thinking the same thing and I knew what movie I was watching.

So the group looks over the house and finds that it is awesome.

Heather gets a big bunch of keys to the place and they come across a mysterious locked door tucked away from everything else. They take a break from rummaging to go to town and stock up on some necessities. The nice-guy hitchhiker convinces them that he should stay back at the house because, charming smile. So that works and he immediately grabs the big set of keys to start ransacking the place. But he also knows there must be treasure hidden behind that super secret door so he heads there for his big payday.

Well payday he shall receive because behind that door is the other survivor of the house burning/massacre from the original film: Jed Sawyer aka Leatherface. PAYDAY (i.e. bashed in the head)!

Meanwhile, in town, the rest of the group (well mainly Heather because she’s hot) catches the attention of the mayor and police, some of whom were part of the original house-burning posse and one of whom is just a young, good-looking, nice guy (because that worked out so well with the hitchhiker).

So the group comes back to the house, see that it’s been picked over by their hitchhiker buddy and decide he must have moved on. One of the guys goes to start dinner while Heather goes poking around the house again. The guy finds his way down to Leatherface’s bedroom and sees that the hitchhiker didn’t make it out after all.

Meat hook, chainsaw, lots of cool blood and guts = Texas justice and one less “main group” member. Heather also stumbles on a corpse upstairs (grandma?) and runs out in a panic. This doesn’t go unnoticed by chainsaw man who then turns his attention to the young and bouncy.

She makes her way to the family cemetery and tries hiding among the tombstones and even tries hiding in a fresh grave; clever, but not too clever for Leatherface, who begins sawing down towards her in a view that was clearly meant for the 3D release of this film.

Now remember when I referred to Heather’s friend as slutty and into Heather’s boyfriend? Well good for you for paying attention! Here’s where that becomes relevant: while Heather is being hunted in the graveyard and on the brink of being chainsaw-ed in the face, we see that the slutty friend has stripped down and cornered the boyfriend in the nearby barn, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

So, post coitus I’m pretty sure, they hear the sound of screams and chainsaws so they come running out to help, distracting Jed and allowing Heather to make a break for it.

They non-killers that are still alive manage to make it to their van and they try to make a break for it. They go speeding up to the closed gate that helps keep out the riffraff and since there’s no time to stop and enter the gate code, Mr. cheating boyfriend/driver decides to crash the gate because that’s what everyone in TV and movies does. But the driver is black and this is Texas so I assume the gate is racist and therefore the van crashes into, but not through, the gate. Hahaha! Wasn’t expecting that. So now they have to get the gate open which gives Leatherface time to catch up just in time for them to drive off but also giving him a chance to slash through one of the tires. He isn’t letting these people drive off, he lived through that humiliation once dammit! So now the van flips and crashes, driver is now dead,  slutty friend unconscious and assumed dead, Heather, not dead, runs into the woods and comes across a county fair going on (oh yeah the fair was mentioned in passing earlier).

 

So a chainsaw-wielding dude strolls through the fair unnoticed… oh wait, no, the cops see it, call it in, and now they know that Jed survived the original fire.

 

Somehow, not really important, Heather gets to the cops and Leatherface disappears back to the house.

Heather describes her ordeal to the cops, including the Sheriff and Mayor, who were at the family massacre years earlier, and they have a heated debate about how to proceed. The Mayor orders one of the cops to enter the house and track down and kill Jed, Hilarity ensues, including one of the more pleasantly surprising deaths in the movie (I won’t spoil it for you but I was pretty surprised!). So while the officer is checking out the house… by himself… like an idiot, Heather is left in an interview room while the Sheriff and Mayor are using Face-time to see what the lonely police officer is seeing inside the house. In the waiting room with Heather is an evidence box containing all of the information related to the incidents at the Sawyer house and what the posse and, more importantly her adoptive parents, did to Heather’s family. Heather sneaks out of the police station and runs into the young, good-looking cop from earlier. Remember how that didn’t work out so well before? Well it doesn’t work out well this time either. The cop ends up taking Heather to an old slaughter house to help bait Leatherface into showing up.

Everyone (Sheriff, Mayor, pretty boy cop, Jed, and Heather) all converge on the slaughterhouse and the climax of the film is another showdown where they try to kill the killer. Lots of gruesome footage here and a neat ending that may surprise some.

Gore:

Plenty of good stuff. Hooks and chainsaws and whatnot.

Sex:

Only implied. There’s no hot nudity, just some good-lookin’ scantily clad people.

All in all…

A much better sequel than I had anticipated, Texas Chainsaw was fun, had some great gory effects and even a few genuine, non-jump scare, surprises.

– Rabid Fox

Maniac (2012) -review by Chea

 

Franck Khalfoun’s remake of the 1980s original,

2012 Maniac is shot in first person with gore and nudity.

A third generations mannequin restoration shop owner Frank (Elijah Wood) is a delusional cereal killer with serious mother issues.

Suffering from chronic migraines, and manic depression he has ravenous blood lust episodes of stalking and uncontrollably killing women which he then scalps.

He staples the hair to his mannequins who, he hallucinates, to be alive and antagonizing him.

He becomes obsessed with a French photographer named Anna who photographs mannequins for an art exhibit.

You can guess how that pans out.

This movie is very visual and whimsical with many dream sequences and flashbacks of him as a child watching his mother and her string of men and drug abuse.

I give it 4 stars. I think it’s much better than the original and really takes you down the path of a maniac. Through their eyes. It has a great soundtrack as well. 

-Chae

Header (2006) review by -your discerning Director.

Based on Horror writer extraordinaire Edward Lee’s novella of the same name.

“What’s a header?”

Header starts off when Travis Tuckton is let out of prison. Being despot poor he searches out his grand pappy Jake Martin in the woods for some shine and reminiscing.
Stewart Cummings works long hours to support his ailing wife. It helps that Cummings is on the take as he runs the rounds of an Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agent in the redneck backwoods. On account of his wife’s serious and ambiguous health condition Cummings feels justified in his nefarious ethics.

“Grand Pappy what IS a Header?”

As Travis and old Pappy get to talking they churn up old crazy feud stories and even more psychotic debauched tales. Travis is intrigued and decides it’s something he wants to get involved with for himself.

Bizarre and violent murders turn up. The Police get involved (cameo by Edward Lee and another horror writer icon Jack Ketchum.) ATF Agent Cummings starts taking more risks for bigger bribes.

That’s all you get folks. This movie picks up quick and it’s something you have to see to believe!

Acting:

The lead acting isn’t the best. I felt the actors tried too hard and didn’t pull off their roles all that well. The theme of this movie is so outrageous you’ll only pay passing attention to the sub-par acting.
Dick Mullany who plays Grandpa Jake Martin was awesome. He nailed his role. He is fantastic as nonchalant thick accented hick of sadistic delights. He talks about a header and feuding violence like he is talking about his mama’s chili recipe. He fully capture’s Edward Lee’s vision of the old double amputee diabetic in the novella. Bravo Mr. Dick Mullany, Bravo.

Gore:

Header is as graphic as it can get away with. They don’t, and of course can’t, show all of the violence. It’s still brutal and very disturbing. Even the most jaded and discerning gorehounds won’t ever forget what a header is. Or the shenanigans Travis and Pappy intimately engage in.

Sex:

There is quite a bit of sex/rape and some nudity, T & A, but none of it’s hardly erotic. Stewart Cummings jerks off near a lake, the man has to relieve the stress of his cognitive dissonance.

Directing:

This being a low-budget flick I felt the director did a decent job. I certainly never felt it was directed poorly. The only thing director Archibald Flancranstin could have done was try to get better acting from his protagonists.

In the end:

Header is a wonderful little gem. As I mentioned it’s based on one of Edward Lee’s stories. He is my personal favorite horror author. He writes what is termed hardcore or Splatterspunk horror. It’s way to disgusting for mainstream bookstores and is sold mostly as e-books or low print trade paper backs. I’d love to see all his books made into movies. There is a ton of great and original content there to make great horror movies.
Header is a fine example. The story is totally sick, there are twists and surprises you probably won’t see coming, and it ends in madness. Just like you want in your gross out horror movies. I think Header is horror dynamite, a solid MUST SEE.

-The Director

As far as I can tell Amazon might be your only sure outlet to find this movie. It’s well worth the money.

GutterBalls 2008 -review by the Director

Gutterballs…

Brought to you buy the clever Canadians of Plot Digger Films (the same company that gave birth, or aborted, Hanger)

Game on:

A couple of rival bowling teams meet in a bowling alley after hours for a little bowling royal.

Strike:

Gutter balls is a highly politically incorrect offense movie. It’s brash and violent. It’s cruel and stereotypical. A brutal rape leads to graphic violence, campy comedy, and rowdy sex.

It’s a mystery serial killer, pick em off one by one, plot.

The gore hits very hard. Gorehounds will be grinning ear to ear with a sadistic smile. Especially during the DIY sex change operation. Not to mention there are a lot of dangerous places to get hurt in a bowling ally, ball returns, pin setters, and pin polishers.

 

It’s sexy including a hot chick in a super high mini skirt bending over to bowl and showing off her naked clam.  You’ll have to watch that scene near the beginning to unleash the fourteen year old boy in you.

The acting is quite bad and zany at times securing it’s B-horror status and cult potential.

She evidently doesn’t like rubber dongs, you’ll see why…

Even though it might be easy to criticize gutter balls for it’s bad acting and low budget feel. It’s a brave film chock full of splatter gore, nudity, and way better than paint by numbers multi-million dollar budget horror.

-The Director.

Haute Tension (High Tension) Aficionado Review

Friend Marie and Alex are on vacation. They arrive at Alex’s parents house to chillax. Marie, the hot chick with a boy’s hair cut, listens to music and masturbates, very nice.

A menacing truck driver killer is the movie’s psychopath. He engages in violent murders and eventually chases the young girls. The ‘high tension’ comes as the girl’s fight for their lives.

The movie doesn’t disappoint with some blood soaked gore.

A Concrete saw, one of Marie’s weapons of choice. 

There is a very whacked twist in the third act. It was our consensus that this was good and bad. We were kind of divided on the twist, some liked it, some not so much. Personally I wasn’t really engaged with Marie and Alex to care by the 60 minute mark.  Ultimately we think this is a horror film worth watching, but don’t go out of your way to see it. Over all most horror fans like it. I can’t imagine it’s anyone’s favorite or in their top 20.

If you like twists, lesbian overtones, and whacked gore including a blow job with a severed head then check it out…

-The Director

The french duo director Alexandre Aja and writer Gregory Levasseur of this flick, later brought us the awesome Hills Have Eyes remake. I highly recommend you see their revision of Hills.

5 Dolls for and August Moon (1970) -review from the Director

5 Dolls for and August Moon (1970)

The lowdown

3 ultra rich business men coerce a scientist to sell his formula for an industrial resin. They all can get rich. The good scientist refuses. The group enjoys themselves on an exclusive island which one can only get to by boat.

This is how we millionaires get down. 

Though the professor is trying to relax with his wife its difficult because he is constantly being offered millions of dollars for his formula. Suddenly the yacht is missing along with a small boat. The boat hand shows up dead. The group is stuck on the island.

Now What?

Now people start getting murdered one by one. It’s a thriller who done it. Husbands and wives are dropping like flies. Until only a few remain. The end if full of twists. Including a long innocuous twist that completely makes the entire previous movie seem nonsensical.

Sex:

All the women and most of the Italian men are gorgeous. No nudity but a nip slip and no sex scenes. There is a strong erotism coming off the women, a secret lesbian affair, and numerous affairs among the married couples. Some of the men even pimp their wife out. Some very dysfunctional rich couples on display. This film could have had a smorgasbord of nudity and lesbian soft core. There was none.

Gore:

Just a silly looking stabbing. Terribly fake gunshots. High body count, this butchered cow.

Acting:

I thought all the acting was par. It’s not hard to play angry, conniving rich bastards, and womanizers.

Directing:

For it’s time, 1970, this was great stuff. Mario Bava was highly regarded by the then film world. The zoom lens had been invented around that time and Bava loved close-ups.

Final Thought:

The very sexy girls and the mystery was all this bird had going for it. I’m not big into traditional mysteries so I had no idea who the killer was nor did I see the double cross later. There didn’t even seem to be clues as to who the killer was, certainly no clues to guess the horrendous twist at the end. The movie needed some eroticism desperately. I don’t even get the title, what is that supposed to mean? As a horror movie it’s one I would pass on. If you are a Bava fan then watch it. If you are looking for something like Black Sunday, this is not it. It was an okay way to spend two hours but I wouldn’t recommend it. Though I’m giving it a low rating, I respect Mario Bava’s huge contribution to film.

1.5 stabs out of five.

-The Director

Dream Home (2010) review by the Director

The Market:

In the USA the housing market was blasting off like a soviet rocket. It was giving real-estate agents wet dreams and home owners felt like they were going to be equiety millions. Experts called it a bubble. It couldn’t last. It was going to pop like a zit. No one listened. Across the planet, Hong Kong was experiencing the same explosion. The city was not a home buyers market. Unless you are one determined buyer.

The Motive:

All Cheng Lai Sheung wanted was house on the water front. She works two jobs. Putting money in the bank and promising herself one day she would have her dream home. Though Cheng grew up poor moving around in the slums of Hong Kong and disappointed in her father for what he couldn’t do for their family, it wouldn’t be her fate.

Cheng shops around. She looks into buying a condo on the water, but she just doesn’t have enough money. She finds her situation intolerable. The more she slaves away the more the housing bubble expands. She will never succeed.

One top of that conundrum, it seems like every man living in Hong Kong is banging a mistress while his guliable wife and kids believe his lies about being in yet another overtime meeting. Cheng is dating an asshole who is cheating on his wife. He likes to get drunk and fuck Cheng in fancy hotels. She puts up with him. He has money. Maybe he can be her ticket to a new life. At some point, Cheng is tired of slaving, waiting, and fucking affluent adulterers. The housing bubble hasn’t popped. Cheng has concocted a plan to drive prices down in one particularly appealing high rise…

Sex:

Naked girls, tits, butts, some fairly explicit simulated sex. Unfortunately the setting hardly makes any of it erotic.

Gore:

It’s a gorehounds buffet. High body count. Ruthless murders, disemboweled, brains blown out, stabbings, stranglings, suffocation, death by jagged wood, eye popped out, a chopped off penis with cum dripping out of it, glass bong death, it’s nasty and very bloody. The effects are 80% practical and look amazing. The attention to detail is excellent. There is some CGI touch ups only the most sensitive palates will notice. Sure I wish all the gore had all been old school but the CGI allowed for some creative kills. 

Acting: 

All the characters performed well. The main character Cheng was attractive and captivating. She was a great lead. She doesn’t seem capable of what she does, but once she is committed she doesn’t give up. I bought it.

There are plenty of city shots and lingering establishing shots. It’s as if the buildings themselves are a character in the film. I am a sexy building, you want me, you want me bad don’t you. 

Directing: 

Dream Home was directed and written by Ho Cheng Pang. He did an amazing job. Home run.

It’s a beautifully shot film. Some creative camera work but not too much so it becomes distracting. The story is told in flash backs of Cheng’s life while jumping to the present as she enacts her psychotic plan. I am always impressed with the precision of Asian films. Their movies look flawless, expert attention is paid to details. Everyone involved works hard to make the movie look great. Dream Home is a gruesome film, unsettling. The erie lack of music during some of the violent parts of the movie add to the brutality. Prepare to be freaked out.

Closing the sale: 

Dream Home is an absolute must see for horror fans. It’s brutal and never lets up.

You will love it right from the start. I enjoyed the way the story unfolded. I was scared of Cheng, her subtle, and not so subtle, determination and psychopathic nature is horror candy. This film even boasts a great ending. How many horror movies start on a high note and end on one? It tests your gag reflex the whole way as it batters you with its nihilistic delivery. Dream Home is coated with feminine materialism grotesquely and uninhibitedly displayed like a crack whore’s spread eagle gash caked with smegma and oozing herpes sores.

See Dream Home immediately, anyway you can. Put forth the effort just like Cheng would do, to get what she wants.

5 out of 5 !!!!!

-The Director

Satan’s Little Helper -review by the Director

 

This is a fun little movie about a too-naive boy named Dougie who is obsessed with a popular video game Satan’s Little Helper. As the movie opens Dougie is excited (creepily excited) to see his sister who is coming home from college just in time for Halloween but, unfortunately, he’s crushed to find out that sis has brought home her boyfriend as well. While Dougie goes off sulking he spots a person in a tacky costume and devil mask who seems to be up to some mischief. Dougie is convinced that the stranger is Satan and the boy begs to tag along and play the part of the little helper.

Now whether or not this masked stranger is, in fact, Satan, he is silent throughout and has an insatiable blood-lust. Satan goes about town merrily slaying people and otherwise causing chaos. Dougie is so caught up in his video game world and thinking that “Satan” is just playing around that the boy doesn’t notice the real danger. In one scene, Satan is pushing Dougie in a shopping cart through a busy parking lot. Dougie begins to look at the people around (the pregnant woman, the old man, etc.) as video game targets and taunts Satan into going after them.

Overall, there’s a humorously high body count, a kid that’s not too annoying despite how blind he is to the chaos he’s helping contribute to, a sister that’s hot enough that Dougie’s creepy obsession with her is sorta understandable, and Amanda Plummer as the mom! The movie has enough quirky charm that by the time Dougie realizes that Satan is a bad guy (shocker!) you actually feel kinda bad for him.

 -Rabid Fox

The Graves reviewed by the Director

The Graves (2009)

The Graves

The Lowdown:

Two curious, and smokin’ hot sisters Megan and Abby Graves (Clare Grant and Jillian Murray) are on a road trip.

Megan has just finished college, looking forward to a big career in business. Abby is an insecure high school graduate. The hot chicks stop off at a Dinner in a small desert town called Unity. There they learn about ‘Skull City Mine.’

Kinda sounds like Capt. Spaulding telling the young folks about the Dr. Satan legend.

Tough ass Megan persuades her timid sister to visit the supposedly haunted ghost town around Skull City Mine. There is a bizarre vibe in the little desert town of Unity. Yet these gothy looking girls sally forth, into big trouble.

Thrills and Blood:

This little straight to video B-horror goes straight to the thrills. We get scanty if any character development. Another group of four young people, I guess in their twenties, also visit Skull City Mine. Two of them are murdered before the camera crew is even set up.

The town of Unity is controlled by a malevolent demon. Not to worry Reverend Abraham Stockton (Tony Todd aka Candyman) mediates with the demon who I guess is Jesus, and the towns people. At least the Reverend seems to think the demon is Jesus.

The killing starts off quick in Skull City. ‘Mama’ tells the girls to make sure and visit the blacksmith. The blacksmith, who looks like a member of Lynard Skynard, says, “It ain’t nothing personal’ before he bludgeons his victims to death with a hammer. Until he meets Megan who has a black belt and is all to happy to fuck up the blacksmith.

The girl’s seem to have escaped until Mama’s other son and older brother of the blacksmith shows up, Caleb ‘Cookie’ Atwood (Bill Moseley). The thrills kick it up a notch.

Acting: 

Tony Todd is good as the Reverend. He gives the part his all.

Bill Moseley is great but it’s not really clear what he really is, his character, though entertaining, is vague. Why does he have a rubber pig snout under his hat? Does he always carry that with him? I guess he is an avid sadist. A role he plays well.

Clare Grant looks like a swim suit model and her acting fits the script. She is in almost every scene and I never got tired of looking at her. Murray (Abby) cries a lot and her mascara never runs.

No one else is of note.

Sex:

Nada. I know right? Disappointing. 

Gore: 

The movie earns it’s R rating. A medium does of blood and killing. We get some of that stupid CGI blood and some corn syrup and red food coloring. A gash here a stab there, not enough to satisfy a thirsty gorehound.

Final Thought:

The Graves is an okay way to spend a movie night. If you are looking for some easy on the eyes female models getting chased, kicking ass, and a kind of supernatural slasher with ambiguous religious over tones, this is it. Bill Mosley and Tony Todd’s roles are small but worth seeing if you are a die hard fan of either of them. I’ll watch anything with Bill Moseley in it.

I will say, as soon as I knew what was going on (about ten minutes past showtime), Lawrence S. Talbot and I guessed how the movie would end. Though I’m sure it was supposed to be a surprise of sorts.

This movie is a solid two out of five, but because I enjoyed it, it starred Bill Moseley, and Tony Todd. I’m bumping it to three stabs. If Clare Grant had done a full frontal and more of the gore and been on screen instead of off, it would have gotten another stab.

A Rating of 3 out of 5

-The Death Director