Tons of new stuff at The Horor Geek.com this week.

First up, the review of Saw 5, followed by a huge retrospective on the first four Saw films.

After that, check out trailers for My Bloody Valentine 3D, the new Friday the 13th teaser, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, news on Season of the Witch casting, the Dead Snow trailer (now with English subs), more archived reviews (I'm up to the "O" section now...), and more.

So, swing by, say hello, poke around, and sign up for the RSS feed.

Mike B.

First off, some news about the site. I started up the new horror geek site in order to try out running my own thing, to see if I could keep up with it, and to figure out if people were actually going to go to the site. After several weeks, the it seems like I'm good to go, so I'll be moving to my old (and much easier to remember) URL, over the weekend (if all goes according to plan). I'll post that URL when everything's moved over and good to go. I hope everyone will follow me to the new site--I promise it's the last move I'm doing.

Until then, the old Horror Geek site is still the place to find my latest reviews and musings on horror film/game/book news. 

This week at The Horror Geek I've posted new reviews of Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds, the low budget zombies vs. strippers flick Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, and the eagerly anticipated Dance of the Dead. I've also got videos from Saw 5, more horror news than you could possibly want, and around 300 or so of my old reviews (covering everything from Italian horror like The Beyond to Hong Kong action flicks like Beast Cops) in the archive.

Next week I'll have a look at Saw 5 (along with a planned look back at the first four films just to get everyone up to speed on Jigsaw's latest), reviews of more of the DVDs from the launch of Lionsgate's Ghosthouse Underground DVD line, and more.

Swing by and say hi.

The Horror Geek

Mike B.

First off, thanks to everyone who stopped by the site in the past week. I appreciate the visits and hope you found something worthwhile to read at The Horror Geek site.

It's another Friday, so there's lots of new stuff to peruse.

First up, brand spanking new reviews of Quarantine, the film that inspired it, [Rec], and one of my contenders for horror film of the year, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer.

If that weren't exciting enough, I've got more horror news than any of the major networks. Find out about Guillermo Del Toro and Antonio Bayona's new project, check out the trailer for David Goyer's The Unborn, watch a clip from the animated horror movie Dead Space: Downfall (a companion piece to EA's new game) and more. If you're looking for Twilight trailer news or anything like that, you're gonna have to look elsewhere--sorry, I just can't bring myself to cover that.

If you're jonesing for older stuff, the review archive continues to grow at a slow but steady pace. Most of my old reviews (from A-K) are now in the Film Review section. Only a few hundred more to go! They may all be live by Christmas!

Anyway, enjoy this week's updates.

The Horror Geek

Mike B.

As I mentioned last week, I've finally gotten off my ass and launched my own horror website. It was time, as a friend told me, to start building something of my own instead of driving traffic to other people's sites.

So far, so good--I'm having fun with it and managing to post new stuff every day.

The Geeking Out blog entries that I've posted here for like a year now are on hold--they'll be appearing at the new site, but hopefully in podcast form. It's just easier to talk about stuff than it is to spend an hour typing--and let's face it, it's easier to listen to me prattle on verbally than it is to slog through all of my text.

So, please swing by and take a gander at everything that's up already. All you have to do is click here. I'll love you for life if you do (and keep coming back) because I'm easy like that. Make me extra happy by signing up for the RSS feed so I don't have to post this crap.

Anyway, if my begging wasn't enough to entice you, here's what's new this week:

News on Romero's new Dead film, the American release of Let The Right One in (including the trailer), screening dates for Bruce Campbell's My Name is Bruce, what Edward Furlong is up to these days, a look at the one-sheet for Dario Argento's Giallo, and more.

Reviews of Friday the 13th: The Series The First Season, Jaws documentary The Shark is Still Working, another look at French horror flick Frontiers, a brand spankin' new review of Fido and several other odds and ends.

And if all that weren't enough, the film reviews archive page has nearly 200 of my old reviews (with another 300-400 still come) covering horror, asian action, and other assorted films all in one handy dandy alphabtized list.

Come, drink it all in--don't let me have done all this work for nothing.

A new Geeking Out is in the works, but in the interim, here are some blurbs from everything I've reviewed this week--as well as links to the full pieces in case anything piques your interest. Clicking the title will take you to the reviews.

Bully: Scholarship Edition: Bully, Rockstar Vancouver's open-world high school simulator, suffered from bad timing upon its initial release. The PlayStation 2 version launched just as many of us were making our move to the Xbox 360, and while the game wasn't ignored, it seemed that most of its press came courtesy of lawyer/professional blowhard/psychopathic circus clown Jack Thompson. Thompson, who has a well documented vendetta against Rockstar's flagship franchise-Grand Theft Auto-started up the anti-Bully bandwagon before he'd even seen the game. I believe his best sound-bite was calling it a "Columbine simulator". Anyone who's actually played the game can take a moment now and laugh at Thompson's rampant stupidity-if you weren't laughing already, that is.

Anyway, luckily enough for those of us who missed the PS2 version, Bully has now been ported to the Xbox 360-with better graphics, more stuff to do, and all the irreverent humor and teenaged angst one would expect to find in your typical John Hughes flick.

American Skin: Bruen has crafted a heart wrenching and unrepentantly violent tale that mixes human carnage and blacker-than-the-devil's-soul-humor with enough pathos and pop culture references to make Quentin Tarantino blush. No small feat for a book that runs only 280 pages.

Rogue: After sitting on a shelf in the Weinstein's impenetrable film vault, director Greg McLean's killer crocodile flick, Rogue, finally hits DVD (with a brief stopover in a few theaters for posterity's sake). Is this newest entry in the ever-burgeoning monster crocodile/alligator subgenre (which has seen the release of this film, Primeval, Lake Placid 2, and Black Water all in the very recent past) the one predator to rule them all or is Rogue just another pretender to the throne?

The Wheelman: I stumbled across novelist/comic writer/Editor-In-Chief of the Philadelphia City Paper Duane Swierczynski after spotting his latest novel, Severance Package, in my local Barnes & Noble (review of that one forthcoming-if I can fit it in somewhere). After devouring that crazy tale in a single sitting, I set out to find more of this guy's work. Figuring it best to start at the beginning (I'm a sucker for tracking the evolution of artists I admire in chronological order), I grabbed a copy of Swierczynski's debut novel, The Wheelman. I was rewarded for this action with a rip-roaring tale that not only heralded the arrival of a serious new talent in crime fiction, but a book that certainly should be adapted to the big screen.

Hellevator: The Bottled Fools: Once you get beyond the unbelievably stupid title (Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock division apparently thought it would be great marketing to take the original title, The Bottled Fools, and spice it up by adding the completely awful "Hellevator" in front of it...), The Bottled Fools reveals itself to be a very interesting low budget Japanese genre film. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to say "imagine if Shinya Tsukamoto remade Cube" Sounds pretty wild, but interesting at the same time, doesn't it? Well, that's basically what this particular film plays like.

You Kill Me: You Kill Me is a solid little movie (courtesy of IFC films, so you know they didn't break the bank when it came to the budget) that's just quirky and indie enough to appeal to the arthouse crowd while remaining funny and familiar enough to engage mainstream audiences. It won't change your life, but it almost assuredly will keep you entertained for 90 minutes. Sometimes, that's all we really need.

Sorry this entry is about two weeks late. As usual, there's no excuse for it, really--just me being lazy.

Not much to report here from Casa de Bracken. It's summer in Oakland so that means one day it's 85 and the next it struggles to get to 60, but that's okay with me. It could stay 60 all summer long and I wouldn't complain. Maybe next month I'll have something more exciting to talk about here...

Inside: I don't know if you realize this or not, but the French have finally discovered something they're good at (other than waving the white flag): making horror movies. What started with High Tension has morphed into an entire gallic horror renaissance over the past few years (and just in time--I can't take anymore of these fucking Asian girl ghost movies). High Tension has always been the best of the bunch--until now.

Inside's premise is simple: Sarah (Alysson Paradis), a young photographer is very pregnant. Unfortunately, four months earlier, she was in a bad car accident—one that left her husband dead. Now, it's Christmas Eve and she's slated to deliver her baby the next day. Still depressed at the loss of her love, she spends the evening home, alone—at least for awhile anyway. Things become much more intriguing once La Femme (Beatrice Dalle) arrives on the scene. La Femme is a complete psychopath, desperate to claim Sarah's unborn child for herself—through any (and I do mean any) means necessary. What ensues reminded of a number of films, most notably Yukihiko Tsutsumi's 2LDK (wherein two women in one apartment engage in a heated battle to the death) only with much higher stakes and an off-the-charts gore quotient.

The film is amazing--it's one of the most brutal things I've seen in a long time, filled with great gore, two fantastic performances (especially the one from Beatrice Dalle), and a final sequence that's so haunting it will scar you forever. This is horror cinema at its finest.

Snuff: Snuff is the latest novel from Chuck Palahniuk (best known to most people as the author who gave us Fight Club). This isn't Chuck's finest work by any stretch (in fact, in some regards his writing style is starting to feel a little formulaic at this point and far less shocking than it used to--despite this, I'd still sell my soul to be able write like this guy) but it should please his legions of devoted fans--like me.

Porn legend Cassie Wright is set to end her career with a bang--or better yet, a gangbang. She plans to shatter the world gangbang record by fornicating with 600 men on camera. Snuff is the story of what happens in the green room while 600 dudes wait their turn to take their place in the annals of adult film history. Told from the perspectives of three men--number 72, a virgin, number 137--a TV star looking to revive his career, and number 600-- a porn film legend, Palahniuk creates a tale of tragedy, horror, and humor. In his typical fashion, Palahniuk has littered Snuff with lots of weird information about the inside workings of the porn industry (including various mentions of Annabelle Chong's gangbang from a few years back), facts about Hollywood stars and what they've done to make it, and his usual biting social commentary. Weighing in at 197 pages, this is more a novella than a full-fledged novel, and the ending isn't the greatest, but Palahniuk's B game is better than most guys' best work. If you're a fan, grab it now. If you've never read Palahniuk but are an adventurous book fan, this is still definitely worth checking out.

Finally, we close with something I really wanted to Geek Out over, but just couldn't.

Mother of Tears: I'm a card-carrying member of the cult of Dario Argento. Argento's films occupy numerous slots on my top 10 horror films of all time list and if you asked me to name my top 10 filmmakers in general, Dario's definitely included. That being said, it's always sad to watch your idols start to lose the magic that made you love them in the first place. For Dario, it's been a long process, full of peaks and valleys. Every time I see something like Do You Like Hitchcock and think he's totally done, he returns with something good like his two Masters of Horror episodes.

That being said, I was always wary of him making Mother of Tears. For those of you who aren't familiar with Italian horror, Mother of Tears is the third film in a trilogy started way back in 1977 with his masterpiece, Suspiria (and followed up by the equally impressive 1980 film Inferno). The films were about a trio of witches who secretly rule the world from their castles in Germany, New York, and Rome. Anyway, ever since Inferno, fans have clamored for the third film in the trilogy. Most of us assumed Dario would never make it--and we were right for thirty years.

However, now Mother of Tears, that long-awaited third installment of the Three Mothers trilogy, is playing in the US. I went in hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Optimism is for chumps.

I'll give Dario this--he apparently knew that there was no real way to recapture the magic of Suspiria and Inferno after three decades (and utilizing two writers who had nothing to do with the earlier films) so he just went all out on this film. The result is a deliriously stupid movie that features some pretty decent gore work but also runs at least thirty minutes too long and has what may be Asia Argento's worst acting performance to date (which is really no small feat when you think about it). Don't even get me started on the "poncho of doom" that kicks everything into motion. Is it nice to see Daria Nicolodi and Udo Kier? Sure. Is it cool to hear about Suspiria's Suzy Bannion in passing and see sketches of the Mother of Sighs and Mother of Darkness's houses? Yeah. It's just that the rest of the movie is pretty meh overall.

Maybe I'm too close to the source material--being a hardcore Argento nerd, that could certainly be the case. Even though I tried to temper my enthusiasm for the film, maybe I had higher expectations than could have ever been met. My wife (who likes Argento but hasn't written 80,000 words on his films and career like yours truly) and stepdaughter (who prepared for Mother of Tears by having her first viewing of Suspiria--which necessitated me giving a lecture on the aesthetics of Italian horror cinema and the work of Argento in particular before she was allowed to push play) both thought it was ok.

I guess I sort of know how the hardcore Indiana Jones fans feel now. They waited twenty years for Jones to come back and what they got was Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We waited thirty years and got Mother of Tears. Both prove that sometimes things we love are probably better left in the past.

And that's it for this month's Geeking Out. Tune in next time when I'll rant and rave about...something.

Another month, another Geeking Out. Lots to talk about this month, so let's just dive in, shall we?

Grand Theft Auto 4: Might as well start off with the 800lb gorilla in the room, the newest GTA game. With GTA4, Rockstar has further blurred the lines between videogames and cinema. The story of Slavic immigrant Niko Bellic's quest for fortune, power, and revenge feels like a videogame merging of the cinema of Michael Mann, John Woo, Johnny To, Beat Takeshi Kitano, and Sam Peckinpah. It's like Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, only playable. It's got everything we've come to expect from a GTA game--violence, vulgarity, hilarity, challenge, and a wee bit of pathos. It also has something that most of the other games have lacked--a main character who may have some sociopathic tendencies but is also very easy to identify with. Truthfully, for me, what makes this GTA game so endearing (and so much better than the games that have come before it) is the cast of characters. In typical GTA fashion, players will encounter a steady stream of quirky criminals, but a few (like Little Jacob, Brucie, and your cousin Roman) are so intriguing and interesting that you come to care about them a lot more than you did in characters found in GTAs past. The game is not perfect, but it's very close. It's GTA with tweaks, better graphics, an easier to use (though still not perfect) aiming system, and characters you actually come to care about. There's a lot of 2008 left, but this has to be the early favorite for Game of the Year honors.

Man Vs. Wild: I've read all the stories about how Man Vs. Wild is staged and fake and frankly, I don't give a flying fuck. This Discovery Channel show is easily the best thing on the network. Host Bear Grylls (who I might have a bit of a man-crush on...and please, let me never type the phrase "man-crush" ever again) might find himself in staged situations (to show you how to overcome them) and might return to a base camp every night, but this dude could survive in these situations if he had to. The guy's been up Everest--he's a tough SOB. Anyway, each week the show drops Grylls into some insanely inhospitable part of the world and he has to survive while showing you how to do it if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. What ensues is an hour of watching the guy show you how you can make your own urine drinkable, eat off dead animals and various kinds of vegetation, and make sure you have a place to sleep at night. It's compelling TV--even if you're not very likely to ever find yourself in a situation where you'd need the information.

Gutterballs: With a title like Gutterballs, you could be forgiven if you thought I was going to talk about some weird comedy about bowling (maybe some kind of low-budget Kingpin or something). Instead, Gutterballs is a new slasher film from Ryan Nicholson (who made the entertaining stalk-and-kill flick Live Feed a few years back). Paying homage to the '80s slasher flicks (which was the heyday of the form) Gutterballs is like a fond trip down memory lane. After a brutal rape happens at a late night bowling alley, a masked assassin (known hilariously enough as "the Bowling Bag Killer"--no doubt because he wanders around with a bowling bag on his head) begins offing the teens involved--in some truly creative and brutal ways. Filled to the brim with '80s slasher film prerequisites (nudity, sleaze, and gore), Gutterballs is essential viewing for anyone who remembers the days when horror cinema was synonymous with masked slashers instead of torture porn. If Ryan Nicholson keeps making films like these, he's going to become one of my favorite horror filmmakers.

And there you have it. Tune in next time when I'll be talking about Chuck Pahlaniuk's new novel Snuff and some other cool crap.

Man, three months since the last Geeking Out? I'm a slacker...

Actually, I was in Florida til the end of February hanging out with the family, then I came back to Oakland and got the flu that wouldn't end, followed up by a sinus infection. I'm just now starting to feel a little better. I'm behind on everything (the website hasn't been updated in ages, despite the fact that I have like twenty reviews ready to go up) and new writing has been sporadic. Top that off with me watching the Penguins dismantle Ottawa in the playoffs...and well, I'm just way behind. But, enough with the excuses--let's talk about what my big nerdy ass is excited over at the moment.

Lost Odyssey: I'm a big videogame nerd and I've always loved RPGs. Lost Odyssey is the latest offering from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker Studios. Spanning four Xbox 360 discs, this is a pretty massive game that's traditional almost to a fault. Random encounters, turn-based fighting, people with amnesia...it's like RPG 101. And yet, somehow, it does all these little things right--things that make the whole of the game greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the stories in the game are so well written that they could have been collected into a book. Some of the moments that are supposed to be emotional actually become that instead of just pantomiming it in videogame fashion. It's not without its flaws, but it's certainly a better game than some of the review scores have indicated. Plus it kept me busy for 70 hours--that's less than a dollar per hour of entertainment.

Half the Blood of Brooklyn: Charlie Huston's latest Joe Pitt novel finds the vampire tough guy working as an enforcer for the neo-hippy Society clan, watching his girlfriend waste away to advanced AIDS, and sent over into the wilds of Brooklyn to deal with a clan of Hasidic Jew vampires--or in other words, just another typical day for Joe. Huston continues to write some of the most compulsively readable noir-esque fiction out there today, even if this is the weakest book in the series so far. Half the Blood is good--it rips along at a breakneck pace never letting up until the last sentence, and Huston's prose makes me weep with envy, but the book itself feels more like a set-up for the next book in the series than it does an actual stand alone piece of fiction (the earlier books managed to work as both). Personally, I think vampires are generally boring and totally played out--but Huston's so good that I actually look forward to reading about the bloodsuckers lurking in the shadows of Manhattan.

Check back next time when maybe I'll have finally seen Dario Argento's The Third Mother.

Oh yeah, only two more weeks til Grand Theft Auto IV.

Not much happening here at Casa de Bracken, really. I left my job at the comic  shop because the commute was starting to suck. Christmas was cool. I'll be in Florida from January 30th through February 26th, so if you want to see me, let me know. Generally, when I come to Florida some sort of calamity happens and I don't get to see a lot of folks. Hopefully we can eliminate that this year.

And now, on with the show.

The Girl Next Door: If I were a quote-whore film critic, I'd undoubtedly start talking about the cinematic adaptation of Jack Ketchum's novel The Girl Next Door as the "feel bad movie of the year". Not since Gaspar Noe's soul-crushing Irreversible have I seen a film that left me so despondent once it ended. This is not a condemnation of the work of Ketchum, director Gregory Wilson, and screenwriters Daniel Farrands and Phil Nutman—in fact, it's the exact opposite. For many years, Ketchum's book had been deemed all but unfilmable. So intense and bleak, his novel length meditation on the banalities of evil and the amoralness of childhood was simply something mainstream America would never accept in the form he'd envisioned it. Forget the fact that it was based on the real life case of Sylvia Likens (which took place in Indiana in 1965)—events like these are best swept under the rug, written off as an aberration even when the news reports of similar crimes indicate it's far more the norm than we'd care to admit. It's only now, after languishing in various stages of development for what seems like an eternity, that Ketchum's unrelentingly dark portrait of the American underbelly finally comes to the big screen—with all its horror intact. If I were doing a top ten list of horror films from 2007, this would be my number one pick.

Exiled: Johnnie To's story of conflicted gangsters (who'd been friends since childhood) looking to make one big score while determining just where their allegiances lie isn't exactly groundbreaking material in the world of Hong Kong cinema. The entire heroic bloodshed subgenre of films has focused on these sorts of stories since the days when John Woo was a "hot young action auteur"—it's a narrative path that has been well traveled throughout the last two decades. Despite this, To brings his own unique worldview to the proceedings—and the end result is an operatic merging of the standard triad gangster flicks, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and the stark violence found in the cinema of Takeshi Kitano. Exiled ticks along like a finely tuned Swiss watch—its outcome as inevitable as the passage of time itself. It is arguably the finest film of To's storied career (even slightly edging out The Mission—a film the seems like a prequel to Exiled), and a glowing example of just how relevant Hong Kong cinema can still be even a decade after the return of Chinese rule. Check it out and see one of the world's more underrated filmmakers at the top of his game.

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions: Final Fantasy Tactics was hardly the first Strategy RPG to appear on a console, but even today, roughly a decade after its debut on the Playstation, it's arguably the best game of its genre. War of the Lions is an updated port for the PSP--and one of the must own titles for Sony's handheld. With deep gameplay (thanks to an engaging job system) and a new retranslated story (which actually makes sense most of the time now...) there's enough here to warrant a purchase. However, the additon of new jobs (like the Dark Knight class), additional battles, cooperative play, and beautifully animated cutscenes make this package even more impressive. The only negative is that the game features some odd slowdown when casting spells (you'll hear sound before you see animations finish)--and the fact that the game is going to eat up 50 or more hours of your life. If you missed out on Tactics the first time around, or just want to take a trip down memory lane, War of the Lions is a must buy.

And with that, another month's Geeking Out is in the books.