My Bloody Valentine(1981)d/George Mihalka

Face it,everyone's a fan of the original My Bloody Valentine,and I've been no exception since I frequented the American Theater down on Main Street multiple times the week it ran way back in 1981,proudly displaying the great one-sheet on my bedroom wall for years to come.Even so,as an eleven year old,I knew what I'd seen was an incomplete realization of what director Mihalka had envisioned for the big screen,thanks to Fangoria's stellar coverage(as always,it seemed!)of the film,and juicy stills of gory splendor that had seemingly vanished from the theatrical print to avoid the ever present X rating for violence slasher flicks were facing in that era.When the first dvd was released,I was frankly pretty bummed.The gore hadn't been replaced,the disc was bare bones,and the disc sleeve looked like balls.When I caught wind of the pending remake,I was less concerned with the new interpretation and more hopeful that a special edition that did proper justice to the original would surface.Ask and you shall receive,as they say.Lion's Gate has delivered the definitive dvd,with ALL gore restored and a slew of extras,making me one extremely happy camper...or is that miner?

Chief Newby removes Mabel from the skin cycle.
Twenty years have passed in the little working class town of Valentine Bluffs since a methane gas explosion trapped five miners in a shaft while the crew foremen left the mine early to attend the town's Valentine's Day dance.Selfless guys,these supervisors,huh.Six weeks later,a miner named Harry Warden is rescued from the cavernous blackness,after dining on his dead co-workers' flesh to survive.Shit happens. After a year in the squirrel farm, Warden escapes on Valentine's Day to snuff the candles of all the guilty supervisors,cutting out their hearts and leaving them as a cautionary warning that,if the town ever has another Valentine's dance,the blood will once again spill.You know,I'll bet the townspeople will try and have a dance ANYWAY later on in the picture!In the present,the Bluffs' prodigal son T.J. Hanniger(Paul Kelman)has returned to town to work in his father's mine and try to patch it up with his one-time squeeze,Sarah(Lori Hallier),only to find she's now enjoying best girl status with fellow miner Axel Palmer(Neil Affleck).No worries,he's got a few days to try and reach her before...drumroll...the big Valentine's dance.And then the murders start happening again.

Lucky might want to rethink his nickname at this point.
As the night of the dance approaches,the mayor and sheriff have a mounting pile of Valentine's candy boxes with human hearts in them on their hands,and naturally deduce that miner-turned-cannibal Harry Warden has returned to exact revenge on the town for ignoring his prior warnings.Meanwhile,horrible Harry is the last thing on the young miners' minds,as they prepare to get loaded,fistfight,and make out with their dates like any good boys would do in the same sitch.When the officials finally step in and cancel the dance in hopes to quell the bloodshed,the boys plan a secret party anyway.And where better to hold it than Hanniger Mine itself?Yeah,brilliant idea.During the party progression, copulation-minded couples eat brutal pick-axe death at the hands of the mystery miner-maniac,when the sheriff and his mayoral counterpart find out that Warden hasn't escaped from his rubber room afterall,and died while institutionalized.So who's killing everybody?Could it be a jealous Hanniger looking to better his odds with Sarah by eliminating all his co-workers?Or could it be someone else entirely,bereaft of a full deck,and following an inner voice to carry on in Warden's footsteps?Curl up with your sweetheart and discover the horrible truth for yourself!

Make no mistakes,the uncut version is a different experience entirely.
What was once,in my estimation, a run-of-the-mill slasher that was slashed itself by heavy censorship has been restored to levels it should have achieved all along.There's an assload of inventive gore splashed across the screen here,transforming the viewing experience into a harrowing,disturbing,and memorable one!The effects by Thomas Burman look marvelous,at least on par with Savini's work of the day,causing Mihalka to screampuke at the sight of at least one of them!I'll finally place this entry in its rightful place among the top slashers of the eighties,believe me,it's been a long time coming.Mihalka shopped a sequel to Paramount in 2001,which they abruptly snubbed,citing the original's so-so returns at the box office.The special edition dvd should set you back anywhere from ten to fifteen bucks,and you really do owe it to yourself to run right the hell out(or is it oot?Canadians,set me straight!)and add this to your collection.I'll be putting the new 3D remake in proper perspective here shortly,as I can think of at least one reader who's ready to spring from her horror-loving honches at your humble N over it!CoughVictoriacough.This one,on the other hand,scores a solid scale rating of:

Harry Warden dishes a dose of very violent Valentine's vengeance to Axel's dead daddio.

King Kong(1976)d/John Guillermin

Because nothing screams originality like a REMAKE.
Nothing exceeds like excess.And no name greater personifies that word than Dino De Laurentiis,synonymous at one point with overblown,big budgeted cinematic flops.If you asked me what I thought about this first remake of the 1933 classic after first seeing it in the theaters as a six year old,I would have exuberantly rambled about its greatness exhaustively.Thirty-three years later,I have a markedly different outlook about it.It's not FX wizard Rick Baker's collaboration with Carlo "Alien" Rambaldi,it's not the star-studded cast,peppered with cult faves like John Agar,Dennis Fimple,and even Forrest J. Ackerman,and it's certainly not Jessica Lange in her introductory role as Kong's bubbleheaded hand candy.For all the publicity and hype this flick generated in its day,it just hasn't held up very well over time.Enraged simians tend to fling poop,and the finished product here smells no differently.

Jessica Lange gawks at the idea of a future sex scene with Jack Nicholson.
Petrox Oil executive,Fred Wilson(Charles Grodin) heads an expedition to an uncharted island in the South Pacific that is believed to hide a depository of oil and is hidden by a permanent low-lying cloud bank.A scruffy primate paleontologist named Jack Prescott(Jeff Bridges) stows away on the ship,busting in during a slide show to warn the crew of a seldom heard history of impending danger on the island,which according to legend is guarded by a monstrous god named Kong.His efforts land him a gig in the brig,but as he's being escorted down by Wilson's shiphands,he glimpses a liferaft afloat off the starboard bow,which,when retrieved by the oceanliner reveals an unconscious half-dressed starlet inside(my favorite kind!).When Prescott brings the dingbat around with smelling salts,it's painfully obvious the crew should have left her floating on the ocean indefinitely.Dwan(Jessica Lneag,I changed a few letters in her name to make it sound more memorable,ya know?)was on a pleasure cruise to Singapore aboard a yacht, peddling her fleshy wares to score herself a part in an upcoming movie,but was spared when she refused to stay below to screen "Deep Throat"(!)as the vessel exploded.The men try to tune out her bubbly airheaded personality and focus on her smokin' curves as they send a recon team into the fog bank towards what they think is the motherlode.

Kong gets to second base with his not-so-eager-to-please shipwrecked squeeze.
After managing to strike out on the oil gamble,fudge up the island natives' symbolic wedding rehearsal,and let Dwan get abducted by aggro Island Abos right under their noses,the rescue team arrives at the Skull Island wall too late,left to track a set of six foot wide footprints.Elsewhere on the island, Dwan is having the first date of a lifetime.Kong(Rick Baker) fluctuates back and forth from mesmerized at the blonde's natural beauty,to thoroughly disappointed that she can speak.After being screamed at,punched,and accused of male chauvenism,the poor brute probably looks forward to getting shot off a New York skyscraper already.As the ape wrestles with a giant-sized constrictor,Prescott arrives on the scene and rescues the bimbo. Wilson decides to slip the monstrous monkey a massive mickey and claim him as an advertising gimmick for the oil company.Back at the unveiling in New York,the saavy exec chains and cages the towering simian inside a mammoth gas station pump,and to add insult to injury,puts a cheesy enormous crown on his head.The things a henpecked guy'll put up with in the name of love,eh?During the glitzy reproduction of the native ceremony,the press people get too close to Dwan,and Kong abruptly breaks the fuck out like chickenpox.Cue metropolitan devastation.Before reuniting with his little bubblehead,the ape stomps New Yorkers(face it,most of 'em had it coming!),derails a train,and makes a general nuisance of himself.Once he's got Dwan,he heads for the buildings that most resemble his happy place back on Skull Island:The World Trade Center.Only happiness proves evasive due to soldiers equipped with flamethrowers and combat choppers who machinegun our tragic hairy hero until he rolls off one of the towers to the street below,leaving the New Yorkers to return to their Soho coffeehouses and Greek midotwn electronic stores.Moral of the story:Women...If they couldn't cook,we'd hunt them for their pelts.

Snubbed for a cab ride,The King of Skull Island goes bananas in the Big Apple.
Nevermind the fact that Rambaldi built a forty foot high 1.7 million dollar robot(which occupies exactly ONE MINUTE of screen time.No typo.)for this trainwreck,or that Mario Bava refused to leave Italy to helm the directorial chair(which was also turned down by Polanski and Peckinpah,and even Spielberg was considered early on),or Baker's long-time dissatisfaction with the suit's realism on camera,or seventies sex kittens Bo Derek and Britt Ekland turning down the role of Dwan,or the fact that there's more blue screen here than in a local news weather forecast segment.Just be thankful we weren't forced to endure Barbra Streisand in the female lead,as she was considered at one point in pre-production.I shudder to think upon what might have been if she had taken the role.Of the three Kongs,this one is the weakest by far,but it does have a fun cult element about it that renders it watchable.Jessica Lange probably scored herself second place on my childhood crush list because of this turn,directly behind Farrah Fawcett-Majors.Jessica,whose parents Al and Dorothy probably want to murder me for incorrectly tying their daughter to the unrelated Hope Lange, proved afterwards,she too,is a great actress,Dwan aside.King Kong Lives was the atrocious sequel with the ridiculous storyline and dated suitmation effects that nobody asked for ten years later.Don your ceremonial monkey mask,dig the voodoo drums,as they beat out a Wopsploitation score of:

The great ape plays dead to avoid thirty thousand swarming Manhattan squeegee bums.

The Strangers(2008)d/Bryan Bertino

Every once in a while,a refreshingly original horror movie floats to the surface in a sea of direct-to-dvd dreck and rotten remakes.Writer/director Bryan Bertino's freshman effort,The Strangers,is just such a flick.He has proven that sometimes,when dealing with terror onscreen,less is more.With a small cast headed by Liv "LOTR" Tyler,and a small story with sparse gore,he's packed an hour and a half worth of film stock with ample atmosphere,tension-laden suspense,and several solid scares.Gone are most of the conventional slasher staples;the group of forgettable sex-starved bodycount teens have been replaced by a sympathetic couple-on-the-rocks,the cookie cutter violence and gore have been chucked out the nearest window and in their place,genuine suspense and terror that borrows from classic fare like Halloween(1978)and Texas Chainsaw Massacre(1974)if anything.I went into this one with low expectations,and came out with unexpected hope for the genre afterall.I look forward to seeing more from Bertino,he may just have some more up his sleeve.With the lights out,screening this alone on your couch late at night,you may feel compelled to put your spotlight on outside,and check.Just for the hell of it.

Kristen and James'(Tyler and Speedman)relationship is over.And that ain't all.
James(Scott Speedman)planned a romantic post-wedding reception evening for he and his girlfriend Kristen(Liv Tyler)at an out-of-the-way summer home,after popping the question on her at the party,but things go from disappointing to not fucking good at all for the disintegrating couple as the night progresses.By the time they arrive at the seventies-tastic digs he's decorated in rose petals beforehand,his girlfriend has already returned his engagement ring,leaving the pair to spend an awkward platonic evening in the country instead.To add to the thickening fog of weirdness,just as Kristen breaks down at the sight of her bummed out beau and offers him some consolation-panties,they are interrupted by a late night caller knocking on the door.James finds a young blonde girl standing just out of the light when he answers the door,looking for Tamra,who obviously isn't there.He drives off in search of cigarettes for his ex(I wouldn't smash extra condiment packets into her face if she was starving after what she pulled,but hey,that's just me)when the knocking begins again,leaving the lone beau-dumping beauty to realize this mysterious young girl is not alone out there in the darkness.

Call me paranoid,but someone's behind Mike(Glenn Howerton),I just know it.
Repeatedly the hysterical girl's emotions are played with as she is terrorized by a trio of twisted trespassers,all wearing masks.When James returns,he finds her huddled in a bedroom,desperately clutching a knife and sobbing uncontrollably.While he hears the harrowing details of her time alone,someone trashes his car outside,smashing the windows and slashing the tires.Realizing her story is true,he tears the house apart looking for a gun to defend themselves from the unseen attackers as they draw the word "hello" all over windows in lipstick,pound the door,and run from shadow to shadow,just out of sight.When Mike,James's drunken friend from the wedding,shows up to rescue his jilted chum from the awkward evening,he is repaid with a mug full of searing hot buckshot,when James accidentally shoots half his face off.The strangers begin to draw their net around the horrifed couple tighter,finally capturing them both despite their best efforts to escape.The next morning Kristen awakes to find the three masked assailants observing she and James,as they are roped together in the middle of the living room.She desperately pleads for their collective lives and asks the younger girl why they were doing such dastardly misdeeds to them,when the girl matter-of-factly replies,"Because you were home." They remove their masks and take turns stabbing the young couple.Later on,a creepy pair of door-to-door Mormon kiddies pass the trio in their pickup truck on the road.The young girl takes a pamphlet from them and returns to the truck as they drive off.The young religious zealots arrive at the summer home,drawn in by the smoldering car outside and trashed surroundings.As they wade through the gory aftermath and dead bodies,one reaches out to touch Kristen's motionless form.She springs up,grabbing the boy and screaming bloody murder.Cuz afterall,that's what it was,eh?

Shotgun-1,Mike's grillpiece-1/2.
75 million clams later,it's safe to deduct this gritty little ditty turned a profit that weren't too shitty.The soundtrack,which was employed marvelously,includes stand out tracks by Waylon Jennings,Joanna Newsom,and Gillian Welch.A sequel is scheduled for production, to naturally mash a good idea straight into potatoes,as the industry big wigs oftimes do.Personally I'd like to see more new horror directors channel the emotion this film's producers captured onscreen for their own work,instead of blindly copying it down to the last frame,and turning it into the latest hot trend.You're bound to enjoy this sleeper once you sit down to it.As well as ranking it one of my underrated films of the year for '08,I'll also bestow upon it a rating of:

Hey little Mormon kids,Kristen probably doesn't want a pamphlet.