Top 10 horror

Defining horror is something that pretty much nobody can do. It covers such a wide range of motifs, themes and sub genres that virtually anytime the word is mentioned in connection with something then someone else is going to say “That’s not real horror.”

Do you mean the slow creeping horror of Lovecraft? The in your face blood and guts horror of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the like? Or do you prefer the off the wall tension and believable horror conjured up by filmmakers like Hitchcock? The list of styles literally goes on and on. Please try to keep that in mind as I go through this list and it’s quite likely I’ve left some things I would have liked to include purely out of forgetfulness. Also these are in no particular order since I tend to reassess and change my mind constantly.

10 - The Birds. A concept that sounds so absurd that in the hands of a lesser director it might have fallen flat on its face. I think I saw this when I was about fifteen and while I had already seen films with better special effects and much more in your face terror I think this is the first movie that truly terrified me. A lot of people would argue that Psycho is the better film and it's hard to disagree so this is largely a matter of preference.

9 - Ginger Snaps. Apart from An American Werewolf in London this has to be my favourite werewolf movie. While the subtext about puberty and womanhood practically oozes out the screen, the film still manages to tell a good story and Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins are brilliant as the Fitzgerald sisters.

8 – Scream. Say what you like about it but whether it was an intentional satire or a postmodern horror movie Scream still stands out among modern horror movies for having memorable and likeable characters as well as one of the most iconic killers of modern times. Not to mention some genuinely great death scenes.

7 – New Nightmare. A second entry for Wes Craven here and again it’s an interesting twist on an old concept. Instead of being the character from the movies Freddy Krueger is a malign entity seeking to invade the real world. The best part of this all is that Craven really brings Freddy back to his roots as a killer and sheds the comedic aspects that became more prevalent as the series progressed. In my opinion the best of the Elm Street films. It plays a lot with the concepts of reality, dream and the supernatural in equal measures so at times you really don’t know what to believe.

6 – The Thing. Where to begin? Kurt Russell for a start is brilliant but the paranoia and tension are the stars of this film coupled with some amazing special effects. A lot of horror fans will probably argue for Halloween but for me John Carpenter is never going to top this film for real pant shitting terror and tension and it even beats Alien for the title of best sci-fi horror. It’s also possibly Kurt Russell’s best non action or comedy role.

5 – The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Not really a lot to say here. Watching it now the effects are a bit dated but given that it was made on a very small budget it still looks better than some modern films and it’s maybe not as scary as I remember it being as a kid but it’s still a brilliant movie and when you look at the story history behind it then it becomes even more admirable because it is a movie made from a genuine love of the the genre and film making as an art form.

4 – Brain Dead/Dead Alive. Another comedy/horror and one of the goriest movies of all time. Like Evil Dead there’s not really a lot to say. The plot that exists is simply there to hurry the movie on to the next act of hilarious violence. Hugely quotable, funny and gory in equal measure.

3 – An American Werewolf in London. The second werewolf film on the list and still a milestone in makeup effects after thirty years on. I recently watched this again and forgot just how funny it was. Actually I looked up the credits on IMDB I never even realized that it’s directed by John Landis who also directed Animal House and The Blues Brothers which probably goes a long way to explaining the humour which despite being a bit slapstick at times never does so to the films detriment.

2 – Seven. If I was pushed to pick a favourite psychological horror this just beats Silence of the Lambs because of the visuals. Both are excellent films but the pay off at the end of Seven and the amazing cast just make place it a step above most other serial killer movies. Plus looking at modern franchises like Saw you can see the lasting influence that this has left on the genre. Actually maybe that isn’t a point in its favour.

1 – In the Mouth of Madness. I’m not entirely sure how well known this film is but by Bob it’s worth watching. Sam Neill stars in this brilliant homage to HP Lovecraft and other great writers of horror fiction.  At times it can be deeply unsettling and the ending despite being depressing is extremely satisfying.

As I said there are probably films I would put on here that I’ve forgotten since I haven’t watched them in a while and some like The Birds where it was a tough choice to pick just one film from the directors career since an entire list could be made just from Hitchcock and some other writers, directors and actors on this list.

Pretty Little Liars, Season One

With the second series of Pretty Little Liars just two episodes in now seems as good a time as any to talk about the first season of the show.

Initially it would be easy to dismiss PLL (look acronyms are cool OK) as just another teen drama but to do so would be to ignore an extremely enjoyable show which despite being aimed at the teenage demographic has enough going for it to appeal to a wider audience. Admittedly the plot can be a little convoluted and nonsensical at times which is the biggest flaw but the strong cast bring a lot to the table and it's obviously been successful enough for ABC to renew for a second season despite some fairly mixed initial reviews and a lot of critics are now realising the shows appeal even if it's just as a guilty pleasure.
It's also gone on to win several Teen Choice Awards and been nominated for the People's Choice Award and a GLAAD award so it's definitely been a mild hit among it's target audience.

In a nutshell the plot of the show is that the girls are trying to figure out who the mysterious presence known only as "A"  is while at the same time dealing with their regular lives. Every episode ends with a cliff hanger and a mysterious figure identified only by a gloved hand.
The show centers around the four main characters Aria, Spencer, Hanna and Emily and the faceless protagonist known only as "A".
Where the show truly shines is in making the four girls likeable despite their many flaws.


Aria despite having a good heart finds it extremely hard to trust others and finds it hard to let go of grudges.


Spencer is loyal to a fault at times is fairly promiscuous and a massive over achiever.


Emily...actually I find it hard to see where her faults lie apart from expecting others to hold up to her own values and standards and can be a bit of a bitch when people fail to live up to her expectations.


Hanna is extremely likeable but because of her past and family issues acts out in sometimes oddly defiant ways. There's also the underlying but never stated fact that she may have an eating disorder but this is debatable since it's never actively talked about in the show.

The show is driven along in two ways. The first by flashbacks to the night of the groups former leader Alison went missing which reveal the back story of the group and how they all came to be friends.
The second by notes, texts and email from the mysterious "A" who is initially taken to be the missing Alison.

The supporting cast are fairly strong as well particularly Ian Harding as Ezra Fitz the English teacher torn between his job and the woman he loves. The show handles his relationship with Aria extremely well considering that it is quite a touchy subject and is usually portrayed as either the older man/woman seducing the impressionable young pupil or the emotional youngster who falls head over heels for the unobtainable older mentor.
Special mention has to go out to Holly Marie Combs of Charmed fame who plays Aria's mother and Keegan Allen as Toby Cavanaugh. The latter is definitely one of the more interesting characters in the show and looking at the actors IMDB page he's not been in a lot of shows but after his performance in this I hope he starts getting more work because he's a talented young actor. Actually that comment could go for most of the main cast none of who are extremely well known but all give solid performances here.

Pretty Little Liars isn't breaking boundaries or reinventing genres but like most of ABC's summer lineup it's a light entertaining show that fills the gap as the big names go on hiatus for another season and with season two just started it's a good time to go back and check out the first season.

Dylan Dog in Dead of Night review

This film is a bit of an oddity and very nearly slipped under my radar until I noticed that the main star was Brandon Routh of Superman Returns fame. Just a couple of points before I start.

1) In my opinion Brandon Routh was the sole redeeming feature of that Superman Returns and since he's been in it I've only ever seen him in Chuck and Scott Pilgrim vs The World and he was excellent in both of them. For some reason I can't help but think of him as a less schlocky version of Bruce Campbell and wish more directors would start utilising him as a comedic actor which he clearly has the talent for.

2) A little history lesson behind the film though since I had to do some research myself. Apparently it's based on a series of surreal Italian comic books but the movie deviates heavily from the source. The wikipedia page sums up the differences so I won't go into them here since they're largely inconsequential for the sake of this reviews.

The film starts out looking like a standard murder mystery albeit with some sort of large hairy creature being the culprit (spoiler - it's a werewolf) and then we get a brief explanation of the setting from the title character. I really dug this intro and it gives the film a vaguely noir tone. The problem is the film fails to stick to this tone or indeed any tone throughout and becomes a confusing mish mash of styles so you can be left confused wondering what sort of balance the director was trying to strike. Overall it comes across as mostly comedy/horror with undertones of action and noir.

The comedy largely comes from the interaction between Dylan and his sidekick Marcus played by Routh's fellow Superman alumni Sam Huntington. While the comedy is fairly predictable and extremely hit and miss the two work well together and really seem to enjoy their roles.
The noir comes from the fairly bog standard story. There's a damsel in distress and through a series of events Dylan is drawn into helping her discover the identity of her fathers killer and eventually track down a stolen object of great power before it can be used for evil.

The action scenes are largely forgettable with the exception of the warehouse scene where Dylan and Marcus battle a horde of cannibal zombies. Yes you read that right but more on that shortly. While the rest just kind of plod along and aren't very well shot or choreographed.

The setting will be familiar to anyone who has watched a supernatural series or film in the last decade. The vampires and werewolfs have an uneasy truce and there is one human (Dylan) who is stuck bang in the middle having been assigned the role of peace keeper between the two.
The take on zombie lore is fairly interesting however and as far as I can recall has never been done before but my memory is fairly bad so no doubt someone knows better. The zombies are completely sentient but can only eat dead or rotten food and anything else they throw back up. As previously mentioned there are cannibal zombies though who have gone insane from hunger and eventually started eating each other.

While you see plenty of vampires, werewolves and zombies in the film there's really only one main character of each. For zombies we have Marcus as mentioned previously and for the vampires we have Taye Diggs as Vargas and the werewolves are headed by Peter Stormare as Gabriel.
Both actors do admirable jobs. Vargas is extremely over confident and cocky that his plan will succeed while Gabriel much like Stormare's character in Prison Break runs his werewolf clan much like a mafia family.

The special effects are passable for the most part apart from the final scene where the boss fight looks like something out of a made for TV movie.

Dead of Night has atrocious ratings on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes neither of which I really think this film deserves. The final scenes are where it really goes downhill and feels a little bit rushed and is obviously meant to lead into a TV series or a series of movies which it probably won't get.
It's definitely not up there with the greats of comedy horror but if you're looking to pass a night and can look past the script which is fairly predictable at times and some comedy which just completely misses the mark then it's a perfectly solid B movie.

The best of YouTube (IMO) Part 1

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a semi regular column on the sometimes wondrous world of You Tube. Today I'll be talking about a channel that's quite rightly becoming huge at a bit over half a million subscribers.
Ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for Simon and Lewis aka The Yogscast.

I first came across these guys while looking for dungeon guides for World of Warcraft and thought the humour and sense of fun they brought to their videos made a welcome change from the more often than not bland commentary of other guides.
Here were a couple of guys who were obviously having fun as casuals in WoW without treating it like a second job like so many others. If you've never played WoW before then it's kind of hard to understand why this seems so odd and if you have played it with friends or a social guild you realise that the fun is never conveyed through most video commentaries.
Sadly the guys stopped playing WoW because after you finished five mans there really isn't much to do unless you want to commit to raiding which is for many when the game just stops being fun and becomes a second job even if you manage to find a casual raiding guild.

A few weeks/months later they started a lets play series of videos on Minecraft and this is when they started their meteoric rise to You Tube fame and in fact their videos are the reason I bought the game.
I very rarely buy games solely on recommendation or reviews but thanks to the sense of fun Simon and Lewis convey in their videos I just had to try this one out.

Perhaps the key to their appeal is that they don't appear to try with their videos. It all comes across as so natural that a lot of people have made the mistake of assuming that they are professionals working from a script. While they've admitted in interviews that as the show has progressed some elements of it are pre prepared it's only Lewis that really knows even vaguely what's going on.
The other key to their appeal is the obvious differences in their personalities. Lewis is for the most part what would traditionally be considered the good cop or the hard put upon straight laced guy and Simon is the whacky side kick.
That's not to say both aren't hilarious it's just that there are times when you can almost picture Lewis sighing as his partner in crime does something that's blatantly a bad idea.

The duo have since added a second channel where they do voice overs and reviews for game trailers and lets play series for other games all in their own inimitable style.
If you haven't seen their shows yet then give them a shot and for the love of Bob if you're going to leave a comment please say anything but "When is the next Shadow of Israphael?"

The joy of bad movies

I'd like to take a moment to talk about bad movies.

The Bad - The "red movies" as I call them. If you have no idea what I'm talking about then the easiest example would be Scary Movie. Typically all of these spoofs have similar cover art which is big red text on a white background with characters from the movie cut and pasted in.
I loved Scary Movie and I'll defend it as a brilliant spoof anytime but at a certain point the X Movie just got ridiculous and ceased to be a parody and more a collection of bad pop culture references with some vague allusion to the movie they're supposed to be parodying.
I pretty much gave up after the atrocious Date Movie or maybe even before that but that's the one I really remember as being the worst offender.
There's really no need to go and rip these movies apart because they are just that bad.

The "Good" - Asylum Studios and SyFy (eugh) originals. Oh dear God I love these guys and their like. Almost everything about their movies is objectively terrible yet I can't stop watching. By definition they should be terrible but they have some sort of X factor charm that reminds you of being a child and thinking "Wow I wonder who would win in a fight between a scorpion and a shark?" If this hasn't been done by the way and someone from SyFy comes across this I demand royalties.

Actually there is a third category where we find Uwe Boll, Tommy Wiseau and their ilk but I honestly think they defy categorisation and bring their own kind of sadistic entertainment and have to actually be viewed as some sort of extreme art project in bad film making.
Coincidentally I'm not sure what's going to be more amazingly tasteless, the upcoming pro life horror film or Uwe Boll's film about the Holocaust.

There's just some sort of great joy in bad movies. Unlike a bad computer game or a bad book they don't ask for any commitment for you other than suspension of disbelief and an hour and a half of your free time.

X-Men: First Class and X-Men Retrospective

First post in this long neglected blog.

So yeah First Class was surprisingly good. Considering I really wasn't expecting much from the trailers it put the previous X-Men films to shame. Looking back at the original trilogy (let's just ignore Wolverine: Origins *shudder*) they haven't really stood the test of time. As summer action films they're pretty good but watching them in light of First Class made me realise that despite being fairly faithful to the source material they didn't really make me invest in the characters despite the great casting. Maybe this was down to having such a large cast that only a handful of main characters got any real development and even then they played second fiddle to the action scenes.

First Class on the other hand manages to strike a near perfect balance of action, plot and character development.

The plot really captures a sense of time well and conveys the uncertainty that was prevalent at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. By the end we see all of humanity finally ending the cold war and getting ready to move into the modern world but at the same time entering a new age of fear and using that new found cooperation to start a new war against mutant kind.
Kevin Bacon is marvelous as Sebastian Shaw and pretty much drives the entire plot along by playing the various factions off against each other and really plays the role like a great Bond villain who just happens to have super powers.
It's hard not to draw comparisons to Bond but also the Austin Powers films with the Hellfire Club which is so kitsch it's almost laughable.

For all this is billed as the story of Charles Xavier and Erik Leshnerr the two of them are never really developed and apart from the comradely of being mutants we're really just told that they're friends and never really shown why. It's a shame because James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender work so well together that you still buy the friendship despite the lack of substance.
The rest of the cast don't slouch either despite being made up of largely B list X-Men characters and the younger cast members seem like much more of a team than the members from the chronological sequels. There is one point where we see the younger members partying which seems aimed at the teenage audience but just comes across as a bit cheesy and pointless.

Still for every bad scene there is a great one. Watching Xavier and Magneto train the youngsters in a 80s style montage is absolutely brilliant and has some genuine laugh out loud moments in particular Banshee's training and everyone's favourite Canadian furball makes a welcome cameo.

The action scenes deserve a special mention because these days it seems like too many films go with endless fast cuts and mass battles but First Class keeps it simple and you're never left wondering what you just saw but still have a sense of epic scale. Remember how bad ass that scene with the bridge in X3 was? Well it rivals that several times.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the films need to keep continuity with the previous films so inevitable sequels.
If the makers had just billed this as a straight reboot then it would have been fine but now they've painted themselves into a corner where they're going to have to keep it up but as long as they continue to make them as well as they made this one then I'm willing to forgive the odd slip up.

***Slight spoilers***
I just have to mention Mystique here. For me she was the most interesting character in the movie and watching her be rejected by some of her own kind including Xavier who she thinks of as a brother is genuinely moving.
Some people have complained that it detracts from the movie but I disagree. At a time when mutation isn't out in the public eye it's understandable how even other mutants would still have more normal standards of beauty and why it's easier to fit in when your mutations are easily hidden. If anything it humanises the other mutants and stops them from coming across as flawless.