Raptor Reads a Bloody Book

I’m a big fan of Hell raiser and yes some of the sequels too so I thought of checking out Clive Barkers’ Book of Blood. Mary, a paranormal expert and comes across a Simon, a psychic sensitive and asks him to help her prove the exists of spirits in a house that’s had an unexplained and violent past. When messages start to appear on the walls and bad things like oh, say the stories of the dead being cut into Simons flesh I think you pretty much proved it.



I was just walking along when suddenly Clive barker Graffiti’s my back! Dam Asshole.

Book of Blood started off pretty good with a girl getting attacked by a ghost and ending up with her face being ripped off. Well, that came out of nowhere. Unfortunately it was a slow down hill run to mediocrity from there. There were attempts at scares with kids going all undead face and ghosts appearing from no where but it just didn’t seem to gel. Mary starts of being quite sympathetic to Simon and seems like quite the nice person. Fair enough but in the last 20 or so minutes of the movie when Simons skin is being written into by ghosts she goes all psycho or mad or something. Even asking for his skin. There really is no build up to it and her story is that the dead must tell there tales and she needs to tell the world. Right. What ever. Obviously it lost something in the translation from Clive Barkers’ story to the movie.

I really was hoping for better on this movie but alas I’m stuck with Hellraiser reruns. I wonder if can find my Nightbreed or Lords of Illusion DVDs? I give this movie a 5/10. Oh there was some boobage…I guess that’s something.

Raptor's Watching Ants

King of the Antz is really one of those movies that will appeal to certain people but will just not sit well with others. It tells a story of Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) who’s life and career are going nowhere. When he is introduced to Ray Matthews (Daniel Daldwin) who convinces him to murder an accountant who has some information on his dirty business dealings for a sum of Fifteen thousand dollars his life spirals in a direction that he cannot control until he gives in to it. Ray reneges on his promises to pay and when Sean protest beats/tortures the crap out of him. He eventually escapes and seeks brutal revenge on ray and his pals. On a side story he falls for Susan Gatley the wife of the accountant played by the sexy Kari Wuhrer but things don’t go to well there either.

So what I took from this film was two things. A) if you want something you sometimes have to eliminate the obstacles in your way B) in the end it doesn’t really matter as we are all just ants to be exterminated. Yes, pretty bleak. I guess that was the point of it really. Sean kills the accounts and manages to form a relation ship with his wife briefly before she finds out it was him and it all falls apart which ties to the first rule. He then seeks revenge on Ray and an even to the pleading of some of the kinder accomplices kills them explaining to the poor suckers that they are just ants and all their protests mean nothing.

I couldn’t decided if I liked or disliked Seans anti hero. While played well he really was a self serving and morally unhinged ass and considering the brutal murder he executed at the begging didn’t truly give you to much sympathy for his plight although the ending does give some sort of satisfaction. The director Stuart Gordon is a bit of cult figure in the Horror movie industry having directed From Beyond and Dagon. In this he kind of looks at the bleakness of humanity and how fragile, short lived and futile it can all be.

 

For me, I thought hey yes it’s bleak but I could see where he was coming from, while I didn’t quite agree and the characters weren’t everything I hoped for they did bring home the message. We are all just ants.

Raptor Wants a Surrogate

You know, it doesn’t matter if Bruce Willis is dressed up as some yuppie cop or looking like a beat up bum he always ends up looking cool and in The Surrogates you get both. He also gets to wear a Toupee and pretend he has hair. Believe it or not. 

Um I think you have something feeding on your head Bruce....again.

The Surrogates is set in a world were robot technology has advanced to the point in which humans can control android avatars to do their daily work while they stay “safely” at home strapped to a control chair. Enter in Willis’s character, Tom Greer a cop who investigates a double murder with partner Peters (Radah Mitchell). What’s unusual is that there hasn’t been a murder for years since the two people where using surrogates when they were killed. How can you kill a robot anyway? Well the murder used a device (small spoiler but it’s pretty much at the beginning of the film) that breaks the safety’s on the control chairs. One of the people murdered was the son of Canter (James Cromwell), the guy who invented the surrogates. Throw in a radical anti-surrogates movement and you have a bit of a Sci-fi thriller on your hands.

The concepts behind The Surrogates are pretty cool. What you have is pretty much what most MMO users have been doing all along. Using avatars to play games or do stuff online. Only in this instance it’s transported to the real world. It also asks the same questions you get from MMOs of identity and humanity. Is the person the same as his avatar? Is it really a male or female? Is it a bot or human? What happens when they go to the toilet? (answered by the way). It also shows us a military view point and in my opinion is quite the way that the future of warfare would go if this were possible.

For action, well it kicks off and doesn’t let up with a script that’s pretty much 1, 2 and 3 but for what it is it’s pretty good, well edited although it ain’t going to win any Oscars. Bruce Willis played Greer with his usual cool. Radah Mitchell was there but she didn’t really have much weight in the film. A sub plot involving Tom Greers wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) in which she uses a surrogate to hide from the world after the loss of their child was quite well done and brought some humanity to Toms character. In fact when Tom has to go out into the real world looks beat up, haggard and yes human compared to all the perfect surrogates running round.

The Surrogates brought up a lot of interesting concepts. It had my friends and I talk about it after for quite some time and that’s always a good sign for a movie. Overall it was well acted, a solid thriller and reasonable plot. My only gripe was the lack of nudity, perfect bodies anyone? It just screams boobies! Anyway I give The Surrogates a hard 7.5.

Raptor Stripps like a Zombie

I have a new favourite Zombie movie. Why is that? Two words. Zombies and strippers. In the same movie. Together. Not to mention that you also get Jenna Jameson as one of the strippers and she can act better than…ok with all the porn movies she’s done she’s a pro at faking it. The basic plot of Zombie strippers is that a group of Soldiers called Z Squad go to clean up a zombie outbreak at a lab owned by Gearge W Bush. Everyone know he owns weapons of mass destruction! Anyway one of the nooby soldiers gets bitten and rather than get his head blown off makes a runner and ends up at strip club owned by the sleazy Hypochondriac Ian played to expertly by Robert Englund (again Freddy yo!). At this point he turns full zombie and attacks Kat one of the strippers played by Jenna Jameson. As the soldier is stuffed downstairs Kat of course gets up and but now she wants to strip and turns out being undead makes you a real good stripper. Slowly the other girls begin to succumb to the lure of being a zombie stripper either through envy, jealousy, adoration or other. Ian sees this as a great opportunity to make money but of course as all zombie movies must go, the zombies cannot be contained and the patrons (dumb males) who the strippers keep lap dancing for (eating their bits) soon break loose.


Fairly new director/writer Jay Lee has done a pretty good job getting this movie together on a pretty low budget. He used a lot of the crew as the patrons and a few friends such as Calvin Green who plays the DJ Cole. The editing is tight and the comedic banter is works well between the actors although some of the joke verge on groan worthy. There are a lot of new faces here and other new bits. The strippers are Hawt! Barring Jenna Jameson we have her rival Jeannie played with bitchy flare by the sexy Shamron Moore. One of the strippers that doesn’t get her kit of is Berenge (Jeannette Sousa) a nihilist that doesn’t quite know if she should support or detest what the strippers have become. Then we have Lilith played by singer Roxy Saint, a gothic and pierced raven who is the first to join kats side. Now this leads me on to the music. It rocks. Roxy Saint actually sang one of the songs that Jenna first strips to as a Zombie called Smother and it got me grooving. In fact so much so that I’m actually looking for the sound track to the movie as we speak…right now like. 

To the special FXs! I have to say down and out these are some of the best zombie FX and gore gags hands down. They were created by Patrick Mcgee and considering the whole film had a budget of $1million that’s pretty impressive. Most of the FX were practical with CGI used sparingly and I’ll have to say my favourite zombie was Tongue guy who lost his jaw in a lap dance. Awww sad. The strippers had about 5 stages of zombiness, from just turned bloody but rare to well cooked black eyed, protruding eye sockets and decaying skin.

The extras on the DVD gave a bit of an insight. There is easily about 45 mins of deleted scenes that were edited to get the movie to a tight 90mins. Some of these I thought would have been great to add a little more to it but there were other scenes that were easy targets to be removed. The commentary with Robert Englund, Jenna Jameson, Jay Lee and Joey Medina is hilarious. We also find out that the movie is loosely based on the play by Eugene Lonescos’ allegorical play "Rhinoceros" with the names of the characters being derived from it including Jeannette Sousa character being the conclusion of it.

Some of the acting was at times a little off, mainly in the Z squad characters but this didn’t detract to much overall. I still thought this was one of the best zombie films I’ve seen in a long time. My score 8.5/10.

Seventh Moon (2008)

You know how sometimes there's a product that really grabs your interest but no matter how hard you try it doesn't seem possible to get your hands on it? You obsess about it a little, build your own mythology the product can never possibly match. You know this deep down but it doesn't stop you. Seventh Moon was one of these things. By all reports a good horror film, the details were sketchy but included some of my favourite movie aspects like handheld cameras (a la REC or Cloverfield), demons, gore and hot women. The trailer..well see for yourself.

Looked like hot larb to me and the kicker was how difficult it was to find anywhere showing it. In the meantime it became my golden movie; something other people raved about, containing all my favourite elements and elusive in its existence. Then, I came across a copy. I should have known better.

Don't get me wrong, Seventh Moon is an okay flick. Set in China on the seventh full moon of the year, the story revolves around an old mythology and the festival associated with it. Every seventh moon, ghosts arise and seek flesh - any flesh. In the cities this isn't a problem but out in the countryside people take the myths very seriously, leaving live animals outside their houses so the ghost's hunger can be satiated.

Into this stumble the idiot Americans; Melissa (Amy Smart) and Yul (Tim Chiou).

The newly wed couple are on their honeymoon when the tour guide driving their car wanders off in the dead of night leaving them alone in the dark. They proceed to stumble about rural China, encountering another luckless man (in a robe) caught out in the open as well as a bunch of ghosts. The ghosts are kind of disappointing as they're naked extras painted up white. So anyways, the trio bumble about in the dark for a while longer until the man decides he'll be better off alone and knocks Yul out. This seemed like a great plan to me, leave the whiny American of Chinese extraction as bait and do a runner in your bathrobe (or whatever the guy was wearing, some white robe thing). The plan goes awry and robe man is forced to run from the ghosts, though in the end they catch and presumably eat him. I say presume because the last we see of robe man is the ghosts dragging him into the long grass. This brings me to another point of unhappiness, the gore. There is none unless I was watching some cut down PG version. Sigh.

Following some more running about, the honeymooning couple are lured into a mansion filled with creepy people holding candles and told they'd be safe there. An odd woman gives them something to drink, which they both go ahead and drink without a second thought, and next you know they've stripped off for sexyness and sex in front of a bunch of weirdos. Cut to them dressed in white robes, outside, locked in bamboo cages. Surprise! Every year the village lures outsiders as the ultimate sacrifice so none of their neighbours are taken. Brilliant! Obviously robe man from earlier in the movie was their original sacrifice, yet somehow he escaped.  Moving right along, the ghosts take Yul away for killing and leave Melissa to be sexy another day. Instead however, she hunts down the ghost's secret lair (this is a genuinely creepy scene) only to find Yul on the brink of death, his blood being drained away so he can die then arise as a ghost himself. Cue escape. The end.

Aside from the average story, dodgy SFX and lack of gore there was no shaky first person camera work. Is this the same movie I read about? The camera was shaken around sometimes but never was it done in a way to suggest that first person, live and unedited experience. A disappointment for me, but others will disagree I'm sure. Enjoying shaky camera work puts me in a select group of people who can handle it without feleing sick and appreciate the premise that less is sometime more. This premise does not apply when considering gore or naked female bodies.

Seventh Moon was an okay horror movie but it broke my heart and for that I give it 6/10.

As an aside, I watched Return of the Living Dead last night and it was pretty good. Two thumbs up for the chick who spent half the movie naked though wearing a flesh-colored prosthetic over her hoo-ha.