[REC]3 - Genesis: 26 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

This review is probably going to be my briefest one yet.  I'm starting to firmly believe that there is the third movie of any given trilogy.  If the second one is good, the third almost always fails.   This has not been true in the case of Star Wars (the original trilogy that is) and Indiana Jones (the third is actually better than the second in my opinion and the fourth suffers the curse) whereas, in the Alien franchise, the third, while not terrible, was badly received and it's production plagued by problems due to the producers, the second and third Jurassic Park movies were pretty damn terrible when compared to the first (the third being utterly ridiculous in a bad way), and almost every slasher franchise's third film has been too awful to even be worth writing about.  With all that said, [REC]3 - Genesis can only be described as garbage.

The film takes place at the wedding of Koldo and Clara, the events of the prior films are not mentioned whatsoever, and we begin with found footage style shooting by family members at the wedding videographer.  One of the groom's Uncles, Victor,  has a bandage on his hand from a dog bite at the clinic he worked at, giving us a pretty clear idea of who is going to be patient zero in this little outbreak scenario.  Sure enough, as the wedding goes on, Victor show more symptoms until a balcony falling incident followed by a bite, followed by more infected people and there goes the wedding.

Where this film changes is that the "found footage" style is abandoned in favor of the traditional narrative style of film making with a symbolic destruction of the videographer's camera before the opening title card.  Sadly, this ends up making the film worse for wear.  The actors all become cliche's, the naturalism which enhances the chaotic terror of the opening goes out the window, and the story then becomes about the bride and groom finding each other against all odds.  People die, there's a kinda cool scene with a chainsaw, and there's blood everywhere, but ultimately that doesn't save this film from the curse.

The main area, where ANY film suffers is the writing, and this film suffers from abysmally poor writing.  This film is directed by one half of the directing team (and one third of the writing team), Paco Plaza, of the first two films and if I had to guess, his partner, Juame Balaguero probably didn't like the direction Plaza took this film because Plaza has zero involvement on the upcoming [REC] 4 - Apocalypse.  I found myself rolling my eyes again and again at the tritely pathetic direction the story took, feeling more like a collection of scenes with no real character development, and no conflict other than the possession zombies.  All in all, avoid this one.  The fourth film picks up where the second one left off (according to the synopsis on imdb) so here's hoping that film makes up for it.  What an awful film.

1 out of 5 skulls.

Humanoids from the Deep: 14 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

Roger Corman is somewhat of a legend in Hollywood.  His company New World Pictures helped create careers for the some of the greatest American directors in film history.  James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich (to name a few) all cut their teeth on Corman productions, in some form or another.  One such director, who didn't quite make it to the spotlight was Humanoids from the Deep director Barbara Peeters.

Peeters was one of two woman who worked consistently in the director's chair with Corman.  She got her chance at directing with 1970's The Dark Side of Tomorrow and followed it in 1972's biker film Bury Me an Angel.  She bounced around various different production gigs at New World, sometimes as a production manager, art director, and second unit director as well before ultimately getting to Humanoids from the Deep after Joe Dante declined.  The film is about a small rural fishing town somewhere up the west coast, they even reference Humboldt County at one point, where there is a tension among the local fisherman regarding a bid to build a cannery in the town.  A native american, Johnny Eagle (yeah, I know), opposes the cannery, while most of town appears to be for it, including a couple of not so subtle racist white dudes.  All of these petty differences are compounded by some dog mutilations, accidents, and disappearances which ultimately leads us to the titular monsters of the story and all hell breaks loose.

The creatures, aren't too cheesy, but are obviously inspired by The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and are still clunky looking buggers who seem to be hell bent on killing men and raping women.  From start to finish the film is a pure exploitation piece, the problem with it is that it's not fun in any way.  Part of what makes these schlocky films live on in the annals of film history is precisely their humor.  This film, has none.  No intentional jokes, no tongue in cheek commentary, and no real point except to "deliver the goods."  I got the sense that Peeters was more interested in the complexity of Native Rights vs White Oppression, but whatever she was trying to say didn't come across. It tried too hard to be a serious horror movie while still being filled to the brim with violence, gore, and rape.

This is what makes it hard for me to watch certain pre-90s horror films and even the modern rape/revenge films make me cringe somewhat.  It starts to become so fetishized that whatever intended statement against said violence is completely lost and we're left with a sick feeling in our stomach and no real revelation, but I'm digressing.  As I said, this is a Corman production from 1980 and this is what you get.  Upon some simple wikipedia research, I found that Peeters originally shot the rape scenes in dark lighting and shadow, which Corman was unhappy about.  He ultimately took the picture from her in post and hired a second unit director to film more explicit Humanoid rape scenes.  Corman also changed the title from Beneath the Darkness to Humanoids from the Deep.  Add these two together without telling any of the rest of the key crew and you get a bit of outrage.  Peeters and actress Ann Turkel asked for their names to be removed from the credits after seeing the changes and Turkel even spoke out against Corman in television interviews.

The film received mostly scathing critical reviews the film still did modestly well at the box office considering it's low budget and it does still have a bit of a cult following.  It includes a great early score by James Horner, and some of the sequences are actually quite good, but none of that really saves it from being anything more than it is: a cheap, Jaws meets Creature of the Black Lagoon gore and rape filled horror flick.

2 out of 5 skulls.

Nightmare City: 05 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen!

I think it's safe to say that most people have had a moment where they watch a movie by a director that they appreciate figuring that at the bare minimum, EVEN if the film is bad, that it will have some quality that shines through that makes it feel remotely watchable.  Then that hope is promptly dashed to pieces and the film watching experiences ends up feeling like a boring waste of time that can never be gotten back.  It's these experiences that allow us to develop a certain taste in the hopes that we can avoid such an experience in the future, but we always end up trying to give those awful movies a chance.  Where am I going with this?  Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, a movie so bad that it makes a 1hr 32min run time feel like a god damned eternity.

Where do I begin?  It's not so much that film is poorly shot, so much that the acting is atrocious, the story is laughable at best, and the hallmark gore that defined Lenzi's early career in the horror exploitation genre is subdued, except for maybe two or three scenes, for some bizarre reason, taking all of what would otherwise be called fun completely out and throwing it into a bottomless ravine.  What can I say?  This movie is total shit.

Hugo Stiglitz delivers one of the most wooden performances of any actor's career, as Dean Miller, a television news anchor who happens to witness a plane full of nuclear contaminated zombie like things that can run, communicate (non verbally of course), use weapons ranging from knives to sub-machine guns, and have an insatiable lust for blood.  You can't sympathize with him at all as he blunders his way through the situation set up in the film, whose ending is one of the biggest let down's of all time.  If I didn't have any integrity, I would just spoil the whole thing to save the rest of you some time, but who knows, maybe you want to watch the film anyway.

Okay, three paragraphs of utter venom, I suppose I should try and make some lemonade out of this situation.  I can at least say that it's pretty well shot, using stylish camera movement which was a staple of the mid 70s to early 80s Italian horror genre.  It's got a pretty funky soundtrack, also a staple of that era, but the choreography of certain shots is just utterly ridiculous.  There's one scene in particular which ALMOST was good had I not noticed the fact that each stab, mauling, and bludgeoning performed by the "zombies" was done after a solid beat where the stunt actor receiving the blow stops moving, as if to just LET the "zombie" hit them.

Maybe I could have enjoyed this film more with a few beers and a few friends.  It's perfect fodder for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.  If you're just plain curious, or you want the proof of what I'm talking about, you can find Nightmare City on Netflix, though you can only watch the Italian Dubbing.

1 skull out of 5.