Helldriver (2010) 1h 57m

If you haven't noticed by now, this week I'm going through my J-Horror collection and reviewing those things that I bought mainly because they looked cool.  Surprisingly, I only just realized that a majority of these films that I own have something to do with Tokyo Shock (The Asiatic cinema/television focus of the larger company, Media Blasters).  It makes sense though since most of my favorites have high powered blood sprays, lots of action, and insane creature design.  So with that fresh in your brain, let's jump into Helldriver!

Kika's home life isn't ideal. She comes home one day to find her mother and uncle eating her still living father.  During her escape attempt a meteor crashes through the mother's chest but her mom pulls Kika's heart out to replace her now missing one.  At the same time, the meteor was an alien which takes over the mother and encases her in some sort of amber-like shield.  Kika is thrown to the side but not before she gets the same shielding.  The mother than shoots space spores into the air which turn those that breath it in into zombies with strange fungal antenna on their forehead (like ophiocordyceps unilateralis in ants).  Kika is rescued and turned into a cyborg (although they say android here) with a metal chest plate and a chainsaw katana.  She and a small group of sudden friends attempt to take out this zombie queen and save the world.

Look at this Silent Hill shit!

All the things I love with these Japanese hyper-gore films are present here.  There's a lot of blood, intense action scenes, absurd and nonsensical things that only work for this movie (ie. a car made out of zombie body parts), and the overall feeling of not taking itself too seriously where it would ruin the film.  If I had any real complaint with Helldriver then it would be my usual gripe about pacing.  I was about 45 minutes into it before the title card appeared which made me feel like the whole first half of the film was meant to be an intro to the latter half, and in a way it really was.  We have so much time spent establishing our characters and the world that, when we get to the heart of the matter, doesn't really need to exist.  It's like playing an RPG and you have to grind for a few hours before you're even able to leave the first section and get to the actual adventure.

Helldriver is really a niche film.  This isn't something I could just drop on a friend and tell them to check it out without advanced knowledge of their cinema tastes.  In this case, it would have to taste like blood... a fire hose of blood all yelling at you in Japanese.

I give Helldriver 2 zombie ants out of 5:

Ranbhool (2010) 1h 50m

Some people say that you can learn something from every experience you have.  I think that after watching this film the only thing I learned was to not trust dudes that wear tie dye and play guitar.  This isn't really new information for me.  I talk shit on hippies all the time.  So maybe this film didn't teach me anything, but rather just reaffirmed my dislike of hippies.

Ranbhool is an Indian film in which a man believes his music is essentially the music of god.  He is such a religious zealot over this thought that he has killed people that have prevented his music from getting out or say that they don't hear the message of god in it.  A teenage girl goes to her father's home with her younger sister and a friend and make contact with this crazy guy via the internet (as ya' do).  Using an Omegle style chat they view a video stream of him playing his music, but they miss him murdering his fiancé.  Everyone tracks everyone else down and it ends with hostages, a standoff, and someone's grandmother getting called in to stop all this shit!

This was not a film for me.  Pushing close to two hours is actually short for most of the Indian films I've watched but this one just kept drawing out scenes for too long.  We get a lot of our killer playing his music but it is literally just the same song over and over again with him jamming on some changes.  It's not even a good song!  I mean, maybe I'm missing the voice of god or whatever in it, but it was just sounded like shitty Phish, and I already hate Phish so imagine that!  I will say there is one moment I liked and it's right after he kills his fiancé and then he plays a guitar solo over her corpse.  That was one of the most metal things I've been privy to in a film.  Too bad it was a hippie solo!

I give Ranbhool 1 dirty hippy out of 5:

Piranha (2010) 1h 28m

There's something in the water!  It's Jerry O'Connell's CGI penis!  Everyone get out of the lake!  Real talk though, there was a part of my brain that ignored the fact that this film was ever remade.  Then I promptly had my mind blown by the people involved with this movie.  Neville Page did creature design?  Jerry O'Connell (and his CGI dick), Christopher Lloyd, Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Adam Scott, Paul Scheer?!  Where the fuck did the money come from for this movie?  Why did they decide to remake Piranha?  And most importantly, why was this movie kind of okay?!

Piranha's plot is simple.  A small quake opens up a crack in the bed of a lake.  This gives way to a subterranean lake full of prehistoric piranha that have also evolved to be extra badass.  It's also Spring Break which means people came to party at this lake.  I assume these college kids are the lamest of the party kids to just come to a small town with a big lake to party.  We have our main characters but it's all the usual shit for them.  Teenage son shirks off his babysitting duties and then he and his wards all end up in danger.  Their mom is the sheriff and has to come save them while dealing with dumb college kids and killer fish.

They knew what the fuck they were making with this film.  It's dumb, but lovable dumb.  There are lines like "If fish looked like that I would fuck fish.  I WOULD ONLY FUCK FISH!"  The CGI kills done by the schools of Piranha are extra gory and great.  We get a bunch of people that end up with gnawed skeletal sections of their body, and even a cable slice followed by an upper body slide down the cut (a personal favorite of mine in horror).  The only thing I really hated about this film was Jerry O'Connell just being the grossest of the gross.  I get that he's supposed to be as sleazy as Joe Francis, but I grew up watching My Secret Identity and Sliders.  Jerry will always be the dorky guy that ends up flying with the help of aerosol cans in each hand.

I give Piranha 3.5 actual piranha out of 5:

Hisss (2010) 1h 30m

No snakes were harmed in the making of this review.  I feel like I need to have that since this film felt the need to open with that notice as well as telling us that all the snakes were rubber or CGI.  I honestly didn't need that notice because they all looked fake a shit.  Definitely a higher quality rubber snake than you can get around Halloween but damn your shit is fake.  The snake woman however, rad as hell!

We have three main characters with Hisss:  The Nagin (a female snake goddess), a police officer, and a rich white American that has stage three brain cancer.  The American hears a story that if you take the Nagin's lover then you could hold it hostage for something, in this case some form of philosopher's stone.  The Police officer just wants to find out who or what is causing a rash of strange killings with puncture wounds and poison.  The Nagin wants her lover back and also stands up for women by killing rapists and men who beat their wives.  She is the heroine this world needs.

Rubber snakes and CGI aside, this film looked great. I felt like I was getting a real view of rural India as opposed to just the opulent upper-class areas we get in a lot of Bollywood films.  The story was a little iffy at times but I never got bored with it.  Once the Nagin became this sort of avenging/defending snake woman I was 100% behind her.  I did get a bit worried that the ending was going to pull some sort of magical fix but it was the most realistic ending I could ask for with a film involving a snake-woman-goddess.

I give Hisss 3 cobras in a top hat out of 5:

The Tortured (2010) 1h 19m

I've never really been a fan of "torture porn" style horror.  Sure, some of the Hostels were okay, the first one or two Saw movies had their moment, and a few others are definitely watchable but just not my thing.  However, this may be my first foray into what could be considered "revenge porn."

The Tortured begins with a couple dealing with the kidnapping, murder, and subsequent trial of the man that did this to their six year-old son.  After he gets 25-to-life as opposed to life without parole, the couple decide that the kidnapper needs to be punished, tortured, for his crimes.

This film is basically broken into two sections with small bridges in between.  You have the establishment of the agony of losing a child in such a terrible manner and how devastated the couple is.  It's mainly to allow themselves and the viewer to feel that this course of action is justified.  The other revolves around the torture of this man.  There are a combination of introspective moral moments and a questioning of the couple's actions.  We get handed some serious twists here and there, but what this comes down to is do the means justify the ends, vice versa, or, is there any real justice at all?

The saving grace of this film is the ending.  I really don't care about the guy's nipple being burnt with a soldiering iron or any of that other crap.  The couple has an odd catharsis to which only the viewer knows the truth and that made me run back through the film in my head.  So it makes me actually think of it when it's done, but honestly I'll probably forget about it in a month.

I give The Tortured 1 prison jumpsuit costume out of 5:

Cut 4 Begins! Day 1: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) 1h 29 m

There are some films that don't get the attention or notoriety they really deserve.  Maybe it's the subject of two "hillbillies" being the actual heroes of the film, maybe it's the fact that this film pokes fun at a lot of the foundations of the slasher genre, or maybe it's just because it has an actor from Firefly on it and that only carries an association with the more nerdy circles of movie fans... regardless, T&DvE really doesn't seem to get the love it deserves.  That includes from the studio because they shelved it for three years before releasing it.

Tucker & Dale focuses around two groups of people.  There are our title characters (there to fix up their new "summer cabin") and the other is a group of college kids that blatantly break every horror rule ever laid to celluloid.  After one of the girls gets startled by Tucker and Dale she almost drowns but gets rescued by Dale.  Her friends see the end and misunderstand the situation and think Tucker and Dale are kidnapping their friend for some hillbilly horror scene.

That right there is the crux of this film.  Everything that really happens is because the college kids have these preconceived notions that the country folks in this West Virginia area must all be some sort of inbred rednecks.  This is only bolstered by the story that one of them tells the others about a massacre that happened in those woods in the past and was blamed on country folk.  We find this later to be untrue, but it's that mindset that leads to the actions of all of the college kids.  It does help though that it seems like the person that owned the cabin Tucker and Dale bought seems to have been Ed Gein... but that's something else entirely.

This film is a lot of fun.  The kills are gory but all believable accidents.  Tucker and Dale are both charismatic and fun leading characters and you dislike the college kids from the start... especially Chad.  Fuck Chad... Chad-ass fuckin' Chad!  There is also a great nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Tucker accidentally hits a bee's nest while chainsawing and this leads to him running through the woods like Leatherface.  This makes much more sense than Leatherface just standing in the middle of the road swinging a chainsaw like an asshole.  Was it that he was getting attacked by a bee trap the girl set before jumping in the back of the truck?  Was it the dogs with the bees in their mouth that shoot bees at you when they bark?!  I'm digging deep for that Simpson's reference...

I give Tucker & Dale vs. Evil 5 'Merica trucker hats out of 5:

Day 23: Kidnapped (Secuestrados) (2010) 1h 25m

I feel as though something were translated poorly as the Spanish (as in from Spain) film Kidnapped didn't actually have a kidnapping happen in it.  There's a weird beginning scene that doesn't tie into the rest of the film, and that guy may have been kidnapped, but as for the rest of it there was no kidnapping.

Kidnapped is actually a home invasion film with a group of rich people I couldn't be arsed to care about and a weird trio of criminals.  There's the all business criminal, the criminal that is looking out for the family, and the hyper-violent criminal.  They're all still dicks, but like I said, so is the family.  I initially thought that the family was chosen because the father could have been involved in some sort of shady business, but it seems that they were just chosen because they were loaded.  Most of the film is either the daughter and the wife in the house while the hyper-violent and the compassionate criminals watch them, or the all business and the father driving around while the bank accounts get emptied at ATMs.

IMDB says that this film was apparently done in 12 long shots without cuts.  I could see that.  It would explain why it was so damn boring too.  You can pull of interesting long shots as a director, but this film had no real direction with it.  The script must have been "rich family moves in house, people break into house, draw this shit out as long as possible, kill everyone."

I give Kidnapped 1 Spider-man ski mask out of 5:

Day 21: Rubber (2010) 1h 22m

Sometimes you really want something, and you hope and hope and hope that it'll happen.  I was doing that with Rubber.  I was hoping and hoping that this would come up at some point in doing this blog.  Every time I would pass it I felt this want, this desire, to see this film with a murder tire just to understand it.  Why did you haunt me tire?!  WHHHHHYYYYYY?

In truth, 2010's Rubber isn't really meant to be understood.  The very first thing we're treated to is a speech about how some things are really nothing and there is no real reason for why certain things happen or exist in film.  It's a good way to set the entire concept of a sentient tire that either has a psychokinesis or maybe a sound/air pressure ability to make things explode.  I don't recall if it gets explained.

After our speech we are introduced to the "audience."  They are literally a group of spectators that are part of the movie, but watching the movie and commenting on it from a hilltop.  All but one are poisoned but the movie is only allowed to end once they're all dead.  So the film continues.

I think that if this film attempted to be serious, it would fail terribly.  Instead, they knew exactly what they were doing.  They were making a film about a murder tire, and so they had fun with it.  They do a great job of making the tire have these horror movie moments, such as being in a shower to scare a maid.  For what it was, I liked it.  It wasn't amazing, I'm not running out to buy it, but I enjoyed it and I'll tell other people to watch it at least once, just to watch it.

I give Rubber 3 Road Kill Cafe menus out of 5: