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The Battery (2012) Review

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the battery reviewSynopsis: The personalities of two former baseball players clash as they traverse the rural back roads of a post-plague New England teeming with the undead.

My Quick Review: The Battery is a slow burn that will grow on you after a while.

I have to admit that after half an hour or so I was starting to look at my watch. But suddenly, for some reason I just started to enjoy watching those 2 characters on screen and having a banter with each other.

What struck me  in The Battery is the realness of the situation (as realistic as a zombie outbreak can be) and how our main characters react in certain situations: for instance the masturbation scene totally makes sense considering how sex deprived you might be when you haven’t seen a woman for months, but was never (to my knowledge) addressed in a zombie movie before.

The very slow and weak zombies are also a breath of fresh air in an age where zombies seem to grow faster and stronger with each new movie (I’m looking at you World War Z).

Finally the friendship between the 2 main protagonists reminded me of Resolution, another indie gem heavily relying on a strong bound between two friends.

Obviously, The Battery can not be recommended to action horror fans or gore fiends, but if you like your movies to be about character development in a realistic post apocalyptic world, you will enjoy the hell out of it.

My rating: 6/10

Director: 

Origin: US

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Contracted (2013) Review

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Contracted reviewSynopsis: A young lesbian is drugged and raped by a stranger at a party and contracts, what she thinks is, a sexually-transmitted disease – but is actually something much worse.

My Quick Review: Contracted is an exhilarating piece of viral horror and one of the best surprise of the end of this year.

Not everybody will enjoy the movie for what it is and there are indeed many negative reviews online for Contracted.

Many people won’t be able to see past some of the incongruence of scenes involving Sam’s doctor and the cluelessness of her mom and friends.  If you look at the surface it feels like poor or lazy writing so that the movie does not end up after 10mn with our heroine in the emergency unit.

But I like to think that those scenes were more of an allegory to condemn the current medical system and the social world we are living in, where people tend not to interact or pay attention to one another, as much as they just gravitate around each other.

I might be giving Contracted  more credit than it  deserves but even with that being said, I enjoyed every minute of this journey into physical decay (similar to the movie The Fly in many aspects). Najarra Townsend is awesome in a very difficult role where the whole movie relies on her overall performance.

I also loved the ending which was quite a surprise to me, an interesting twist  that gives everything that happened up to this point, even more sense.

My Rating: 7/10

Director: 

Origin: US

Click Here to Watch Contracted Online Now

Open Grave (2013) Review

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open grave reviewSynopsis: A man wakes up in the wilderness, in a pit full of dead bodies, with no memory and must determine if the murderer is one of the strangers who rescued him, or if he himself is the killer.

My Quick Review: I had forgotten about Gonzalo Lopez Gallego, the director of Open Grave, despite him being the man behind El Rey de La Montana, a very exciting thriller with some awesome POV shooting scenes. The problem is that since that movie he also directed  Appollo 18, one of the worst found footage of recent memories (according to critics, so maybe I should go and watch it to make my own opinion soon).

The early scenes in Open Grave are gorgeously shot and demonstrate all the technical ability of Lopez-Gallego. What could have been another variation of the “strangers waking up in a locked place” genre ends up quite elevated by the direction and a story that shows some originality.

To say more about the story would spoil the fun and I’d suggest to stay clear of any trailer or promo materials if you wanna enjoy Open Grave to its fullest.

There are only 2 main issues with the movie: the pacing is a little bit off at time,  there are some lackluster scenes when I did have a look at my watch. And the script, while entertaining, keeps the cards too close to the chest and prevents us, the viewers, to be totally concerned or involved with the characters (who are not being helped by poor dialogues). This is a case of keeping the viewers too much in the dark.

Open Grave has been out in Europe for a few months now and will be stateside in early January. It’s the perfect little thriller to start 2014 in style.

My Rating: 6.5

Director: 

Origin: US

Click Here to Watch Open Grave Online Now!

 

Dog Soldiers (2002) Review

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dog soldiers reviewSynopsis: A routine military exercise turns into a nightmare in the Scotland wilderness.

Quick Review: Ever since I watched The Descent, I’ve always wanted to catch up on Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall’s first effort. Now that I’ve seen it I’m kicking myself for not having watched it earlier.

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Dog Soldiers is one of the best werewolf movie of all time, period. Maybe only second to “An american Werewolf in London”.

Right from the start there is a sense of urgency and hopelessness that grips you until the very end. Director Neil Marshall succeeds to keep our attention on a tight budget with only 2 main location throughout the movie. It starts as a military movie, with a great cast of characters by the way, and turns into “Night of the Living Werewolf” with our heroes locked into a house trying to protect themselves from their assaillants.

I loved everything about Dog Soldiers: the dialog sounds real (some local slang might be difficult to catch if you’re not used to it) and is, at times, hilarious, each actor does a good job at making us empathize with them, the editing is great and the script, while quite straight forward, is tight enough with no time wasted om overstretched scenes.

When watching Dog Soldiers, I understood better why The Descent was such a blast of a movie. Neil Marshall is, in my book, one of the best action-horror director working right now and he proved it again with Doomsday and the episodes he directed for Game of Thrones. Now I need to catch up with his last movie, Centurion.

My Rating: 7.5/10

Director: 

Origin: UK

Click Here to Watch Dog Soldiers Online Now!

High Tension (2003) Review

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high tension reviewOriginal Title: Haute Tension

Synopsis: Two college friends, Marie and Alexa, encounter loads of trouble (and blood) while on vacation at Alexa’s parents’ country home when a mysterious killer invades their quiet getaway.

Quick Review: It’s interesting how the perception you had of a movie can change over the years. I first watched High Tension about 10 years ago and fell in love with it. It was a raw, brutal, unforgiving ride that started the new wave of french horror cinema that would bring us so many classics (Inside, Martyrs, Frontieres..).

Watching the movie again today, I had a much harder time appreciating it and could only focus on the negative aspects of it.

HUGE SPOILER WARNING!!! (stop here if you haven’t watched High Tension yet)

Now that I know the twist, I tried to check if there was any warning signs or clues throughout the movie that could have warned us. Except for one of the first line of Marie when she said she had a dream and she was chased by a killer, and the killer was her, there is nothing to make us think she might be the killer. And I’m fine with that. What’s not working though is that there are so many plot holes in that case, that the whole movie does not make any sense (where is the truck coming from, why are some of the victims reacting the way they do, what is in Marie’s imagination, what is not).

In retrospect it really does feel that Alexandra Aja and Gregory Levasseur only used the twist as a way to shock the audience, but there is not enough logic and ties-in with the rest of the movie to justify it. High Tension would have been the better movie if they had kept things straight with a classic villain (who, by the way is greatly played by the always awesome Philippe Nahon). On a side note, most of the movie follows the same plot than Dean koontz’s book, Intensity. A great read by the way.

END OF SPOILER

In 2013, the movie also suffers from 10 years of torture porn and a myriad of gory slashers that make it much less impactful than it was back in 2003.

So what’s left? High Tension is still very efficient and brilliantly directed. The score and music choices are spot on and contribute to make High Tension an entertaining piece of horror cinema. Not the classic I once thought it would be, but still a must-watch in my book, if only to see the birth of Alexandra Aja as one of the new master of horror.

Rating: 8.5 (first viewing in 2003), 6.5/10 (second viewing)

Director: 

Origin: France

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