Hills Have Eyes 2, Premonition, and Dead Silence

The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

Sequel to the Hills Have Eye remake directed by Alexander Aja. I loved that film...even more so than Wes Craven's original film. Craven's original...I always thought was too slow, too boring, and not the least bit scary. But the remake had a better cast, I thought there was more tension, the soundtrack by Tomandandy was haunting and at other times adrenaline-pumping, the gore was plentifuly and brutul, and the third act of the film really picked up in the action department. When Aaran Stanford, a father trying to get his baby back, finally turns the tables on the villains it's an exciting scene....I was cheering (on the inside at least) and it got me pumped up (and this was after a wonderfully brutul fight scene between Dough (Stanford) and Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith). In other words, I very much loved the flick.

So the film cost about $15-$20 million and and it made about $40 million...so a sequel was quickly under way and it comes out about a year precisely when the remake came out. A group of National Guardsmen (and two women) set out in the desert on a training exercise. They befall a group of mutants and the soldiers are killed off one by one. This is a junk food movie....not good for the brain, but fun for easy thrills. For some reason this was an easy watch for me. Maybe because all the negative hype had me prepared for what I was about to see. Or maybe seeing what amounts to a feeling of the slasher films of the 1980's on the screen is certainly my idea of fun. Either it got bad enough for me to like it, or simple and straight to the point enough for me to be mildly entertained. A pretty good sized bodycount, a few good bits of gore (a cut off arm, a head being pounded and squashed by a big stone, etc.), a decent score (with some bits from the score in the first film), and a pretty fair pace (about 3 or so people are killed from the get go in the beginning of the film) makes this a dumb, fun throwback to the slasher flicks of the '80's, to which I'm a huge fan of those kinds of movies. Although the characters are thinner than paper, you've seen all this kind of stuff before, the make-up on the mutants is horrible, and the kills aren't really that imaginative....I was entertained. Like I said before...either it was kinda fun to watch, or it got bad enough for me to laugh and thus still be entertained.

Premonition with Sandra Bullock....oh boy.

The story tells of Bullock being a wife and mother of two, who finds out one day that her husband has passed on from a car accident. The next day she wakes up, her husband is alive. It seems that each day becomes a different point in time. One day it is sometime before the accident, the next day is sometime after the accident, and so on. I'm sorry but this film just BORED THE SHIT OUT OF ME. It wasn't scary...it's not really a horror film at all. It's more like a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to 90-some minutes. One thing that bugged me.....one of these days after the accident, she gets put into an asylum , is medicated, and possible arrested. But then it's never touched on again....either I completely missed the part where they explained HOW'D SHE GET OUT OF THE FUCKING ASYLUM or this movie didn't do its' job. There's just nothing fun about this movie...it's like watching paint dry. Don't get me wrong, I like Sandra Bullock. But she can't save this film from being a complete bore....and her character gets on my nerves as well. There were many times where I was yelling....FUCKING DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT. YOU KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT, SO DO SOMETHING COMPLETELY OUT OF THE BLUE AND CHANGE THE FUCKING TIMELINE. Like there was a funeral on Saturday she went to....then she wakes up to a day before it and her mom asks "when shall we have the funeral." Sandy says "tomorrow" (Saturday) and the mom looks at her like...'really, that soon?' She simply says 'yeah.' And this is the same woman who CALLED THE ASYLUM AND PUT YOUR ASS INTO TH EIR CAUSE SHE THOUGHT YOU WERE OUT OF IT! Why didn't she just change the funeral...just to see how that could change. Make it Monday, or next week, or next month, something. Or the first time the days change, she doesn't realize that "hey wait a minute, one minute i'm sleeping on my couch with one set of clothes, now I'm in my bed with a different set of clothes'....WHAT THE FUCK. Now come on....I EVEN KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I WAS WEARING AND WHERE THE FUCK WAS I SLEEPING DURING THE NITE. But whatever...fuck this PG-13 shittastic movie.

Dead Silence

The second film made by James Wan, the director of Saw. A man and his wife find a ventriloquist dummy set upon their doorstep one day. Later on, the wife is killed in a horrific matter. Now the husband heads back to his hometown, where a local legend is linked to the same dummy that was on their doorstep. It tells the legend of Mary Shaw, a woman who was a ventriloquist and later on was murdered. She had no children, only dolls. And if you scream, that's when Mary Shaw strikes. This is a pretty decent film with a cool ending. I'll never see it again, but it was good to see the flick at least once. There's a good old fashioned mood and atmosphere running throughout the movie, with Argento like use of colors and creepy uses of the dummies. What really got me interested were the few scenes where the ambient soundtrack goes silent (hence the title)...it works very well and it created a couple of nicely tensed scenes. The dummies look great, they're well done and extremely creepy. But I guess I've had my fill of ghost stories for a while: There's been The Ring, The Ring 2, Pulse, The Grudge, The Grudge 2, The Return, Darkness Falls, Dark Water, The Messengers, not to mention all of the Japanese films (Ringu, Juon, Infection, R-Point, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Eye). Still, all in all this is a pretty good film. Definately worth at least one look.