Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City trailer dropped, words and reaction ensue, etc.

Yesterday we finally got to see the first trailer for the Resident Evil film reboot, known as Resident Evil Welcome To Raccon City for a while, and people aren’t exactly going gaga for it.

Color me not surprised, since fanbases are notoriously both easy and fickle to please, and years of Paul W.S. Anderson brand of action have clearly rotted some people’s brain overtime, i haven’t seen them all, but i did witness the vomit inducing unwatchable mess of Resident Evil The Final Chapter in theathers, and that already should set the stage for things to go inevitably up. Or at least avoid triggering motion sickness in moviegoers.

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[EXPRESSO] There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021) | Mid Slashing

Netflix is ramping up the horror output in October as expected and as usual i test my luck choosing what actually sit and down watch by using a bit of the old “eeny meeny miny moe” strategy.

There’s no telling if it’s good, just that it’s on Netflix…and will actually remain there since it’s an exclusive.

A fresh release (debuted worlwide on Netflix 3 days ago), There Is Someone Inside Your House is a slasher film written by Henry Garden and directed by Patrick Brice, following Makani Young, a transfer student from Hawaii that made the terrible mistake of moving to Nebraska, it’s no wonder she founds herself caught up in a case of gruesome murders happing in her new town.

Aside from the title being both straightforward and a shoe-in for a weird ass Adult Swim short film, the set up is pretty typical, with a killer going around targeting people apparently connected to a hazing ritual in an american football college team, wearing replicas of the soon to be victims’ faces, the characters are the expected ensemble of teens…. actually acting like teens, the killer exposing the victims’ secrets, the main character and her friends trying to figure out who’s the killer, etc.

Some good gore effects, decent acting, some decent setpieces, but there’s….. not really much to it, and the execution it’s a messy, misguided affari. You do the usually game of watching people die, the likeable teen characters bite the obvious bait,, until it’s actually revealed who is the killer and why, as the narrative loses focus after the first act and kinda meanders about the usual throdden path without nteresting things happening. Even the reveal of the killer’s identity is a doozy.

It’s not BAD, it’s just…. fairly forgettable, kinda throwaway average slasher fare.

American McGee’s Alice PS3 [REVIEW] | The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

Oh yes, American Mc Gee’s most well known work, his take on Lewis Carrol’s Alice.

The story is not really that original in retrospect, it’s the usual “let’s give fairy tales an edgy reinterpretation with a grim, depressing tone” applied to Alice In Wonderland, so here Alice is Alice Lindell, a british orphan that by chance survived the house fire that took away her family at the age of 10 (or something), and was basically raised in an asylum, mostly likely treated to a Richard O’ Brian-less brand shock therapy as well.

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The Spooktacular Eight #1: Doom Annihilation (2019)

Ah, yes, the newer Doom movie adaptation, one that basically came out direct to video 2 years ago, to the sound of not much fanfare and people claiming it killed their mum in cold blood it was so bad, so terrible.

Clearly these people don’t know any better, because i was surprised to finally come around, unwrap my Blu Ray copy i got on the cheap last year, and seeing it was actually not that bad, at all, far from the disaster people claim it is.

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The Spooktacular Eight Cometh

Tis the season again, but due to the cursed nature of time itself, this year we’ll have a small horror retrospective for the “month of Halloween”, with 8 reviews sporadically released during the month. Hope you’ll like the selection of movies, and yes, there won’t a set release pattern, but we’ll start tomorrow, so look forward to that.

[EXPRESSO] Intrusion (2021) | Expected Unexpected Invasion

More Netflix perusing, so far it’s often a 40-50 % chance of getting some good, at least in my attempts, so whatever, let’s see this new exclusive Netflix horror thriller about home invasion, simply called Intrusion, which i find to be a bit too simple and descriptive, but whatever.

Premise is also fairly straightforward, about a couple moving into their dream house only to have an attempt home invasion, leading the wife to search for answers and find out that what happened is only the beginning of more creepy things to come.

Intrusion has definitely some ambition, as it tries to nest surprises and twists into what initially seem a set up for a home invasion thriller, since the intrusion itself happens very early and the bulk of the movie is about the wife eventually learning more than she bargained about his architect husband and his secrets.

Problem is, it’s too committed to try and thwart your expectations, to avoid becoming predictable and surprise you, even going as far as trying to make an anti-climax…. problem is even that isn’t very convincing, as there’s half a hour of movie left, where the movie eventually goes into what you expected to it go from halfway through, as not to completely waste the long build up, so the script kinda sabotages itself in a quest to avoid being predictable, making the characters and the pacing worse in a transparent attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.

I feel bad because there’s definitely effort put into the movie, decent atmosphere and acting, but it focuses too much in trying to be not predictable at the expense of pretty much everything else, while ultimately being fairly easy to read and see where its going (and goes), making for a predictable, overall middling result.

Parasite (2004) [REVIEW] | Not that one either

Not Bong Joon-ho’s. Not the Charles Band’s kind of Parasite either.

Not even the manga by Hitoshi Iwaaki, sadly.

With this one we’re reaching deep into the ass of forgotten crappy b-movies from the early 2000s, dumped among many of its brethren on streaming sites, i discovered it while browsing Amazon Prime Video, and i would wager it’s pretty much available on the service anywhere in the world.

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Bone Eater (2007) [REVIEW] | So, as i pray

Yes, there’s more. There’s always more TV movie monster movies for me to dig up… often just picked to kill off some time on a sleepy saturday morning from my Amazon Prime Video watchlist (when the frigging service decides to keep or relist them without charging more for it, despite being obvious fodder, always were, always will). And there’s a 40 % chance Jym Wynorski directed them.

Jym Wynorski direct this as well, why even doubt he didn’t direct them all at this point?

And as you might have guessed from the year it was released (and my other reviews of similar TV movies), it’s another SyFy commissioned crapfest produced via CineTel films, who also brought us movies like Lavalantula, the Ghoulies franchise, Super Shark, Indipendence Daysaster, even the new strand of I Spit On Your Grave sequels (following the 2010 remake). Just to name a few.

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Mega Snake (2007) [REVIEW] | Snake Of The Father

Things lead to things, and so i accidentally started out a Tibor Takacs mini-retrospective of sorts. It just kinda happened, i guess.

And sadly, no, he never made a TV movie about killer frogs or slugs to complete the “asian rock-paper-scissors” trifecta or the “Aesop fables’ bingo”, but he did direct this for SyFy the same year as Ice Spiders, and that would the last creature feature from him until Spiders 3D, as he preferred to do more disaster movies about tornadoes (regular ones) and christmas-family movies, which is – in a way – quite usual for older genre directors to end up doing in the later years.

But today is snakes, or at least one singular Mega Snake, and it’s a bit more interesting than Ice Spiders, more ridiculous but also less by the numbers, even if it’s another Nu Image joint shot in the Bulgarian capital for the same reasons already discussed in previous reviews, as it’s quite cheap.

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[EXPRESSO] Prey (2021) | Die Freischutz, Die

Let’s go Netflix diving once again, with this german horror-thriller.

First, really, you couldn’t find another title for your movie?

Then again, i don’t expect people to confuse this with the 2007 killer lion movie, or the other killer lion movie from 2016, also called just “Prey”.

Premise it’s as stock as it gets for horror, as it’s about five friends escaping from someone hunting them down with a rifle in the woods, where they came just to make an excursion and relax.

A cabin of sorts gets involved somewhere down the line, sure, but don’t expect any subversion or satire of genre diktats, and while it’s not technically a “slasher” since the murdered uses a hunting rifle, it’s just that, a technicality, and expect some answers in the end, but not a twist.

The execution it’s not totally stock since it relies on atmosphere and tension, the mystery of why they are being hunted, and while on paper i do like the concept of not relying on obvious answers and trying to make the raw execution of a simple idea work without trick or convenient cliches… the execution here gives way to mostly boredom and not much to go on or look forward, with some substories and some drama just there to add something to the movie.

While there are some moments of decent tension, the acting is decent and it’s not completely boring or worthless (it’s not), it feels way longer than it is for a movie barely under 90 minutes, and it’s definitely not the kind of movie you wanna fire up if you’re already feeling sleepy or doozy, this isn’t made to “wake you up” to begin with, but it being fairly dull doesn’t help.

Mediocre and forgettable, you decide if it’s worth watching even once.