Horror Reviews!

I'm going to start using a new system for reviewing now. It's not that all my scores are changing but simply that I am translating them into letter grades in order to make my decisions clearer. I think A - Excellent, B - Good, C - Satisfactory, D - Unsatisfactory, E - Awful and U - Not even worthy of a grade is perhaps rather clearer than a score out of 5. For this post only I'll put the new and old grades side-by-side. From then on I'm just going to use the letter grades.


Fido (2006)


Wow, this was a crazy Canadian zombie comedy. It's more general bizarre satire than out and out hilarity, but it's really sweet and there are definitely some clever aspects. The basic gist is that, post-zombie apocalypse, a corporation has managed to arrange communities that are isolated from the horror of the zombies. These communities are trying to artificially produce a sense of civilisation and society while ignoring the real horror that surrounds them, so what better way to emphasise that point than to make the whole society appear stuck in the 50s?

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Seige of the Dead (Rammbock: Berlin Undead) (2010)


Okay, the first thing I need to point out is that there are no actual "dead" or "undead" zombies in this movie. Now personally, I'm not terribly keen on the claim that movies like 28 Days Later aren't really zombie movies. I say: If it walks like a zombie and eats brains like a zombie, it's a zombie. Still, the difference is that 28 Days Later doesn't have the word "dead" or "undead" in the title. In any case the zombies in this movie are infected people, not the living dead.

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Phantasm (1979)
The positive side of Phantasm is that there's no lack of content. There's a whole smorgasbord of weird s**t going on in this movie. The negative side is that the ending is incoherent and the acting is atrocious. To what extent that matters depends on what you are hoping for.



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Bride of Re-Animator


Jeffrey Combs returns in this even lower budget sequel to the absolutely fantastic horror-comedy "Re-Animator". Somehow Dr. Herbert West (Combs) manages to persuade his housemate that putting his housemate's dead girlfriend's heart into a weird stitched up combination of organs is a really good idea.

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Bride of Frankenstein (1935)


The movie begins with Mary Shelley talking with Lord Byron about her novel and explaining that the story goes further than she wrote in her book. This was quite a bizarre way of beginning this movie that is unsurprisingly is very unfaithful to the books. Still, what follows is a pretty strong indication that this is intended as horror-comedy.



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Awesome Article on the History of Doctor Who

Excellent article on Io9 explains the different styles that the Doctor Who show came to have over the course of its history.
It makes a lot of sense and it's really interesting to think how these different elements came to be mixed and matched in order to shape the show as we see it today. It's also good to see some recognition given to the quality of storytelling during Ace's run as the Doctor's companion.

Dalek: "Small human female sighted on level three."
Ace: "Who are you calling small?"
*Smashes up Dalek with baseball bat enhanced by the power of the Hand of Omega*
Dalek: "Under Attack! Under Attack!" *Ace breaks off the eye stalk* "Vision Impaired!"