Martyrs

         Welcome back to French Horror 101! This may be my last installment in this area for a bit, but Dave will soon have his review up of the film that started the “French Horror Wave”. Before I get started with my review, I must warn anyone that shows interest in viewing this film. This movie is heavy stuff. There is even an introduction by the director before the movie starts, warning viewers of what they are about to view. Granted you’re not seeing a snuff film, but you will see stuff that is highly upsetting. Now let’s take a look at Martyrs.

         Martyrs starts off with young Lucie, our main character who has been imprisoned and abused for some time, escaping her abductors. She is brought to an orphanage where she befriends Anna, our other main character. We get a glimpse into their friendship as children. It is apparent from the start and later on that Lucie and Anna are best friends, with Anna acting as a caretaker to Lucie. Fast forward fifteen years. Lucie discovers who her captors were and where they now live. One unlucky morning, the family is greeted by Lucie and her fully loaded shotgun. Lucie informs Anna of what she’s done, and the two try to make sense of the mess. During this whole time, Lucie is being attacked by a strange, vicious creature that hurts her physically. This has gone on since childhood, and continues throughout. Lucie confronts her demons and commits suicide, leaving Anna to pick up the pieces. She sticks around long enough to discover a very dark secret. This is where the madness goes into overdrive.

         Sound confusing? Well, it kind of is. There are a few different things going on at once, but they all come together to make sense. The thing haunting Lucie isn’t totally a subplot, but it is very evident for half of the film. The movie will make sense about midway through the film, then again at the end. The biggest aspect of Martyrs is that it transcends genres. This film is honestly as much a dark drama as it is a horror film.  You will be disgusted, pissed off, upset, and shocked at what you see in this film. But there is something much deeper lying beneath Martyrs. The underlying message will be what you make of it. This will definitely take a long time to sink in, and will probably keep you thinking about it for a few weeks.

         The tone of the film is total dread. You never know what is coming, but you feel like the outcome won’t be promising. The gore isn’t there for the sake of gore; this is one of the few instances where this is true in a film. Though, what gore you do get, it is done superbly. The cinematography is sweeping and luscious, while the score is very interesting, but works perfectly. The final thirty minutes of the film can be unbearable to watch. It’s a grueling experience, but it is necessary for the film. Overall, Martyrs is a horror masterpiece that truly transcends itself and becomes something larger. If you can tolerate the things you see in Martyrs, you will be paid off with an incredibly unique film experience. That is something that can’t be said of too many horror films of the last decade.

-Chris

Hatchet

            My first two reviews here at Highbrow Horror have been of very straight faced, serious horror films. I love them because they truly are terrifying and have been deemed so by nearly everyone who has seen them over the years. However, I don’t think I enjoy anything more than a good ole’ gory schlock fest full of dark humor and insanity that doesn’t take itself seriously for a second or is too low budget to know better. And that is exactly what Hatchet is.

            Back in the 80’s, one subgenre of the horror film reigned supreme, the slasher. Slasher films never pretended to be more than they were, which was outrageously violent, ultra sleazy, nudity-filled gore fests. This subgenre has yielded some of the greatest horror films of all time such as the Friday the 13^th series, Nightmare on Elm Street, and even more obscure films such as Maniac and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. In the 90’s there was the Scream franchise and after that, Hollywood began churning out mainstream re-makes of these films and others from around the globe. It seemed that no one had an original idea anymore.

            Then in 2006, writer/director Adam Green gave us Hatchet. The film boasted two tag lines, “It’s not a remake. It’s not a sequal. And it’s not based on a Japanese one,” and “Old school American horror.” I am happy to say that these two taglines perfectly capture the light feel and awesome approach to this wildly gorey romp through the swamp.

            The film introduces Victor Crowley, a deformed and hideous creature who lives in the Lousiana bayou. As a child, he lived with his father, who kept him hidden away from the rest of society as he was constantly made fun of and humiliated. One Halloween night, years ago, a group of kids gathered at the Crowley house to scare Victor by throwing fire crackers on the front porch. Victor was alone while his dad was out in town. Accidentally the house was caught on fire and Victor was trapped. When his dad arrived home, he quickly grabbed a hatchet and began to chop down the front door to get to his son. Little did he know that Victor was on the other side of the door and the hatchet killed his son. Now, Victor Crowley haunts the swamp and gruesomely murders anyone who dares venture into it. This legend becomes all too real when a swamp boat tour is broken down near Victors house. One by one the members of the tour are picked off as Victor Crowley exacts his revenge against the society that ruined his life.

            This movie is clearly made with one type of audience in mind, the slasher film audience. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not for one second. There isn’t any hidden subtext rich in social commentary on the state of America or anything like that. It plays out with its tongue firmly planted in cheek and embraces everything that happens with arms wide open. People complain that it’s too funny, or that Victor looks like something from the Goonies, and to those people I would say, chill out! I think everything about this movie is intentional and made to make us laugh and squirm.

            And squirm we certainly will, as the gore score is off the charts in this one. We see people’s limbs wripped from their torso’s, numerous decapitations, a man hacked in half sideways with a hatchet, a sandbelt sanding away a girls lower jaw, and a womans face wripped in half via Victor Crowley’s bare hands. It’s all done “in camera” with traditional F/X, no CGI and it looks amazing. I’ll take this type of gore any day and this instantly gives the film more props from me.

            Top it all off with a handful of awesome cameos from Robert Englund (everyone knows him as Freddy Krueger), and Tony Todd (the Candy Man). Victor Crowley is played by Kane Hodder, everyone’s favorite Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13^th series.

            So, as you can see, this is a winner with me. From it’s light campy tone, the amazing gore F/X work, to the cameos of genre favorites, Hatchet is a film that sets out to make the slasher fan happy, and it worked very well with this slasher fan.

            Hatchet 2 comes out October 1^st unrated to theatres and promises to up the ante on all accounts. If you are a fan of gory horror films, you’ll see Hatchet 2 in theatres because this hardly ever happens. Most of the time the MPAA comes in and cuts a violent film to shreds and we only see a portion of the directors vision. With Hatchet 2, we get to see everything Adam Green wanted us to see, and I can’t wait to see it for myself.

-Dave

Poster by Micah Moseby.

Dead Snow

  A group of medical students are spending the week at a secluded cabin in the mountains to relax and escape the stress of school.  Unfortunately for them, their cabin sits atop the site where a large battalion of Nazis froze to death during WWII.  Oh, by the way, the Nazis are now zombies.  How? Why? That’s not important.  What is important is that these college kids are now in a fight for their lives against a troop of flesh eating National Socialists.

            Dead Snow is a movie made by horror fans for horror fans and director Tommy Wirkola makes this very clear from the get-go.  Wirkola’s Norwegian Nazi-zombie flick can be seen as his homage to classic horror comedies of the 80’s and early 90’s.  Fans of the early works of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson will be instantly sold.  The self-aware nature of Dead Snow is what allows it to succeed.  While the premise of a group of kids visiting a secluded cabin has been done to death, it becomes justified when the characters reference the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th in the opening scenes of the movie.  From that point on, any self-respecting horror fan viewing this film is forced to abandon any “they don’t make them like they used to” attitudes toward contemporary horror and simply enjoy the ride.     

  The first half of the movie is pretty slow-paced, almost to a fault considering the familiar nature of its narrative structure.  Once the students are settled in the cabin, they are visited by a mysterious drifter who claims there is a curse on the mountains and they would be well advised to leave as soon as possible and never come back.  The kids ignore the warnings and the drifter continues to inexplicably wander aimlessly through the same mountains he claims are too dangerous for any human to inhabit.  Even though a good forty-five minutes are spent setting the stage in Dead Snow, the characters are still relatively one-dimensional, with the only real attempt at depth being that one of the medical students is, ironically, afraid of blood.  

  However, the uneventful first half of Dead Snow is completely redeemed once zombies start to rise from the snow.  As soon as the living-dead Nazis begin to attack the cabin, any notion that Wirkola would not be able to live up to the standard of classic horror he references at the beginning of the film is instantly abandoned.  Dead Snow features the cutting edge in gore-related technology and showcases a brutal struggle for survival as the characters face off against the undead Third Reich.  Each blood-soaked attack leave will you thinking, “There is no way they can top that” and yet, somehow, Wirkola manages to continue to outdo himself in every scene until the credits roll.

Horror connoisseurs are sure to appreciate Dead Snow, a film that is truly aware and respectful of its roots.  If the notion of an unoriginal plot or one-dimensional characters concerns you, then you’re missing the point.  Dead Snow delivers tense and shocking moments as well as thrills, laughs, and plenty of buckets of blood.  This movie pulls no punches and is exactly what you want from a film about undead Nazis.  It’s time to update your Netflix queues, horror fans.  Dead Snow will not disappoint.

-Jonah

Poster by Phantom City Creative.

Inside

            Leave it to the French. This has become my motto towards horror films lately. The 2000s were somewhat of a bleak era for American horror. America was caught up producing remake after remake of the genres greatest hits including: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and The Hills Have Eyes just to name a few. There was a sever lack of creativity outside of Eli Roth and a few select others. So while this was going on here, the French were busy upping the ante with their own imprint of brutality. In 2003 the French unveiled Haute Tension (High Tension). High Tension was released in North America two years later. Its depiction of violence and depravity was something that hadn’t been seen since the golden years of horror in the 70s and 80s. This was a very good first impression of French horror that would only be outdone with future films, which leads us to Inside.           

            Inside, or À l'intérieur, found its way onto DVD in the states in 2007. The film starts our with a nasty car wreck in which we find our main character, Sarah. Sarah, our lone survivor of the wreck also happens to be pregnant. Fast forward to Christmas Eve, our heroine is due the next day. Visions of her deceased husband from the wreck haunt her through the night. Here is where things get awfully bad. Late in the evening, Sarah gets a ring at the doorbell. Santa, maybe? I wish. It turns out to be a mysterious woman who knows a lot about Sarah. Frightened, Sarah calls the police to report the incident. The police arrive to find nothing at all and wish our poor Sarah a safe and merry Christmas.

            What unfolds for the next hour is one of the greatest achievements of the horror genre in a few decades. I won’t get into great detail because I don’t want to spoil much of the surprises, but consider this: our villain’s choice of weapon is a large pair of scissors. The blood flows real quick as Sarah is stuck in a nasty game of cat and mouse in her home with this mysterious woman who wants to take her baby from the womb. A few poor guests meet a grim fate at the hands of a pair of scissors. Throw in a lobotomy, an incredible blown off head scene, and a human hand stabbed to the wall and you have yourself an ultraviolent French horror film.

            Although the film takes place entirely in Sarah’s home, the tension is nightmarish. The FX is some of the best I’ve seen, and doesn’t rely on CGI to get the job done. The last fifteen minutes of the film are pure carnage and chaos that won’t leave your mind for a few days. I’m sure everyone has heard that before in a horror film review, but you haven’t seen it like the French do. So does Sarah survive and keep the baby? This is one hell of a journey you’ll have to make for yourself to find out. Welcome to French horror 101, courtesy of Highbrow Horror. 

- Chris

Poster by Micah Moseby.

Survival of the Dead

            Master of the undead, George Romero is back with his latest installment to his “of the Dead” franchise.  Many complain that Romero is passed his prime. While Romero may not be redefining the horror genre with his later works, his “Dead” films consistently demonstrate clever wit, high tension, thought-provoking themes, and, of course, buckets of gore.  I, for one, have never seen a Romero film I wouldn’t recommend and Survival of the Dead is no exception.

            Like most Romero flicks, Survival takes place during the zombie apocalypse.  The dead have returned to life with a taste for human flesh and anyone who still has a pulse is struggling to survive.  A group of renegade soldiers seek refuge on a small island off the coast of North America.  They soon discover that the island is inhabited by two feuding families at war with each other because of their ideological differences concerning the undead.   One side believes the zombies should be disposed of while the other side believes their souls are still intact and humans and zombies will eventually be able to coexist.  Romero uses these families to provide interesting social commentary for the pro-choice/pro-life debate.  The soldiers must now settle the score between the two families and, at the same time, somehow manage not to be eaten by the ever-growing army of the undead.

            Say what you will about how the acting bad or how the plot is absurd, but you cannot deny that everything about Survival is completely deliberate.  Romero is fully conscious as a filmmaker and his work is unapologetically his own.  This film won’t win awards or be remembered for its innovation or artistic merit, but it is still a thrilling ride from start to finish.  While this may not be on par with Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, a lesser Romero zombie movie is still better than 90% of the zombie movies out there and this is one that should not be missed.  Survival of the Dead is now available on DVD.  See it.

- Jonah

Poster by Charlie Adlard.