The line “Produced by Michael Bay” isn’t a good sign, but David S. Goyer has done some good stuff, and this trailer is at least chock-full of really disturbing, creepy stuff. It might be that that’s all the movie will have, but at least that’s something. Erratic and weird movements as a horror element is officially very mainstream, at least. Go to The Unborn trailer at the Apple site to check it out.

I had heard good things about [•REC], the somewhat obnoxiously titled second horror feature from Catalonian director Jaume Balagueró. His first film was Darkness, from 2002, which I’ve mentioned on this site before as being generally boring and mediocre. The last 10 or 15 minutes were actually very good, however, (but couldn’t quite redeem the rest of the movie).

While Darkness was supernatural horror with devil worshippers, dark rituals, and opening the gates of hell, [•REC] (I get the feeling I’m going to get very tired of typing that before the end of this review) is a modern zombie movie in the style of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with a touch of Blair Witch Project style “this is real footage from people who happened to be filming the event” pretenses.

In short, Barcelona local TV reporter Ángela (slightly annoyingly perky) and her camera man Pablo make a show called “While You Sleep“, basically feature reporting about what goes on in the city at night. This particular night they’re visiting a fire station, and goof around getting bored waiting for some sort of alarm so they can accompany the firemen and film some action.

Of course, that’s what they get, when they get called to an old apartment building whose inhabitants have been hearing screaming from the apartment of an elderly woman. When they break in to the apartment, accompanied by the police, the woman is bloody and behaves erratically, and then suddenly bites one of the police officers. A short time after, when attempting to get out of the building with the wounded guy, they discover that the local health authorities have sealed it off, posting armed guards outside and wrapping it in plastic.

You can probably see where this is going, and you’re right, there are handbaskets involved. It’s not horribly original, but it’s fairly realistic (especially the stuff at the beginning looks very much like what I’ve seen of unedited documentary footage), and while the start is maybe a little slow, it quickly picks up. The last 10-15 minutes in particular are extremely intense, to the point of giving me a good, solid adrenaline rush in the theatre. Also, the direction the plot takes at the end, where things get quiet and brooding and creepy, and you get a sort-of explanation of why all of this is happening (which mixes in just the right amount of supernatural horror and that particularly unsettling Catholic fanaticism), followed by one of the scariest movie monsters I’ve seen in a while, and a scene so tense I could hear people holding their breath in the theater), really, really works.

The whole “real footage” conceit is pretty good, but it fails in a couple of places. First, there’s a scene where Ángela demands that Pablo show her the footage he just shot, to make sure it’s on tape, and we actually see the rewind and then the footage play again, then cut back to “now”. I guess this could be explained that we’re not watching the footage, but the events as they unfold on the monitor of the camera, but it’s sort of unneccessary and weird.

The other thing, which is less of a problem, is that the movie has music. It’s fairly subtle, typical incidental music, but I noticed it a couple of times, and it does distract a little from the documentary feel of the whole thing. Also, if you’re really going to nitpick, people in the movie speak Castilian Spanish, while they’re in Catalan-speaking Barcelona (all signs, uniforms of the firemen, etc. on screen are in Catalan).

But these are minor problems. Once it gets going, [•REC] has you on the edge of your seat, adrenaline pumping, until the very (abrupt) end.

This has been noted on several websites after the announcement of the Locarno win, but I didn’t know that Enrique Rivero, director of Parque vía, had an identical twin brother. Apparently he does, though, and they’re even in the same business.

While Enrique makes arthouse films, his twin brother Seth Rogen makes successful indie comedies like The 40-year Old Virgin and Superbad.

I was just told that Parque vía won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. That’s a huge deal, actually, congratulations to Enrique, Paola, and everyone else involved, ourselves included, this time.

As you can see, Enrique got an enormous gilded (I assume that’s not solid gold) feline to take home with him. Locarno is one of the larger and more respected international festivals, especially for auteur and experimental cinema, and this should be a boost for the movie, both in terms of distribution and for consideration for the Ariels, the Mexican academy awards.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that the movie got a new poster just in time for the festival, and it’s pretty awesome.

I thought the old poster was quite ok, but the photo on the new one is great, and really works for what the movie is about. I don’t know who took it, but I know Macias at Raya en medio is responsible for the poster, and he did a wonderful job.

Oh, and it has our logo on it, second from the left.

Parque vía, the movie directed by Enrique Rivero that we did post supervision on, has its international premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland during the first weeks of August, according to The Hollywood Reporter and others. I’ve known about this for a while, but not been allowed to tell anyone. Congratulations to Enrique, Paola, and everyone else involved. I’m sure it’ll do very well, it’s a good movie.

The same guy who made Chainsaw Maid has a lot of claymation horror stuff on YouTube. This one is pretty derivative of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but then at the end, there’s a vagina dentata-mouthed goat demon thing that freaks me the hell out, even though it’s a cute clay figure.

This claymation short is a pretty pitch-perfect take on zombie movies, especially the variety common in the seventies, like Dawn of the Dead. And somehow claymation blood and gore works really well.

You might have seen this video, which is a compilation of the best unintentionally hilarious scenes from the (by all accounts dire) remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage:

As if that wasn’t enough, however, there’s this mixture of the audio of the idiotic final scene from the movie with video from Mega Man, and, well, here’s Mega Wicker Man:

Neil Marshall’s a smart director, and he’s also very genre-aware. I liked his Dog Soldiers quite a bit, as a relatively fresh take on werewolves, which managed to do a lot with a small budget. I was less enthusiastic about The Descent, which I reviewed here back in 2005.

With Doomsday, he’s changed genres a bit. It’s certainly at least as gory as his earlier work, but this is a science fiction thriller in the vein of Escape from New York, which it obviously gets a lot of inspiration from (the heroine wears an eye patch for a bit, even). There are also bits clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies.

The plot isn’t particularly complicated, and it doesn’t matter that much either, to be honest. 20 years ago, in 2008, a virus broke out in Scotland, and the British government quarantined off all of it with a huge wall following the old path of Hadrian’s Wall. Now, the virus has broken out in London, and it turns out there are survivors in Scotland, who might hold the key to a cure. Badass paramilitary cop Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who barely escaped from Scotland as a child, leads a team of soldiers into the quarantine zone to find and bring back the cure.

That’s about it, really. As I said, the plot doesn’t really matter that much. Of course, the Scots have gone feral, divided into two camps, a Mad Max group of cannibalistic punk rockers (why is it that the fall of civilization equals mohawks and facial piercings?), and another group who have regressed to the middle ages, living in and around a castle, ruled over by a feudal lord. And obviously, the military mission goes pear-shaped really quickly, most of the soldiers are killed, and the few survivors need to resort to cunning and gory violence to survive and perhaps get what they came for.

This is not a perfect movie. The acting is ok, although Rhona Mitra has never been my idea of a great actress, but she’s good looking, and convincingly badass in this. The plot is simple and a bit thin. But the movie’s fun to watch, at times very much so, and it knows what it’s trying to do. As I mentioned, Marshall is genre aware, and this is at least as much a homage to his favourite movies as the Kill Bill movies were to Tarantino’s favourites. Hell, there’s even a synthesizer based score that sounds like anything John Carpenter did in the 80s.

In summary, recommended if you like Escape from New York, any of the Mad Max movies, and genera over the top action and gore. Not recommended if you don’t have a sense of humor, or can’t watch movies for pure entertainment, without taking them too seriously.

I wish I had the time to watch and blog about 100 movies in 100 days. Luckily, I don’t have to, since Scott Hamilton did it first. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including many horror movies, and the reviews are well-written and witty. And it includes a review of a Korean war/horror movie called R-Point, which I really want to see.