Scary bears and mediocre zombie things...

We decided against seeing this film at the cinema even though it was quite hyped and we were in our super duper horror watching period when it came out.  Now it has come out on DVD and we have watched it!

Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

The plot is simple, a group of friends decide to go on an adventure to the nuclear disaster town of Chernobyl. Weird things start happening and they lose their guide and car. There's something lurking in the darkness, something mutated from the nuclear disaster.

This review won't be very long because it's the first one in a while and it was quite a while since we watched the film. There's one word that can describe this film: mediocre. It's all through a watchable film but it's definitely nothing special, it has a couple of scares but in a horror you want a little bit more bang for the buck.






Here's a picture of a bear that's somewhat related to the film.

Grade:







~ Chris

We withdrew some money...

...and watched ATM.

ATM is a film I've seen a trailer of somewhere, either in the cinema or some DVD, Aim doesn't recall seeing anything about it but we (I) decided we should give it a try anyway.

ATM

The basic plot:
Three people go in an ATM hut, neither me nor Aim has ever seen a building like that before but maybe they actually have them in America. There they get trapped by a hooded man, that at first just stands there and watches them, they get freaked out and holes up in the hut. Later the guy kills a man that is out walking his dog in front of them and they realise that they're in mortal peril. His attempts to lure them out/kill them in the hut continues as they try to think of a way to escape.

My thoughts:
The film is...meh...and quite unsatisfactory, it gives no reason for the hooded man to do this and the acting is really awful. Furthermore there's tons of pointless dialogue and a romance that makes Twilight seem like Romeo and Juliet.

The idea for the film is good but it leaves much to wish for. A higher pace, a better insight to the hooded man, better acting, and less crap dialogue.

That the script was written by the guy that wrote Buried first struck me as quite the surprise but when I come to think of it, the dialogue of that film wasn't the best either. It was better delivered by Ryan Reynolds though. I also see the similarities between the two films and that the writer has drawn inspiration from his own work. Although if you're going to watch one of his films go with Buried, take my word for it.

And now for what you have all been waiting for...
will it get a tongue?

Nope, I can't recommend this film even though I liked the basic idea of it enough to watch it after seeing the trailer.

~ Chris

I want my life back

I'm just glad it wasn't me who paid for this. Another one we chose from the infamous top 20 DVD releases in ASDA that appealed to us with its 'super awesome' cover art...

Dark Island (2010)

The premise: 'After losing contact with its researchers on a remote island, a military corporation hires a group of scientists and soldiers to find out what went wrong. When they arrive, the team quickly discovers that experiments performed on the island have unleashed a powerful and deadly entity that will stop at nothing to destroy them all.'

What we actually got: A dull and uninspiring cast with bizarrely uniform nasal voices running around a miserable Canadian island interspersed with some truly hilarious shots of pseudo cold blooded military personnel discussing things in a dingy office. Every now and again they are terrorised by some sentinent black dust.

I wanted to hate them, it would've made this whole viewing experience more enjoyable for when they started dying stupidly and horribly, but I couldn't even force myself to care enough. 

So many of the scenes in this film felt like shoddily made remakes and direct lifts from other films; ye old assembling of the 'crack team' of scientists and experts with 'clashing' personalities, (read stereotypical; the beardy mysogynist, the Asiatic expert in combat, the plucky female scientist etc) before shipping them off to a secret island used for military weapons testing to squabble and flail about miserably before causing each other's deaths through incompetence and deception.

The scariest thing about this film was probably the opening scene, but then that fails miserably as soon as the cast start speaking. There's some really quite tortuous dialogue that kills anychance of tension building. Another thing that stopped any tension whatsoever is the editing of the combat and action scenes. It zips about all over the place, with random close ups of random body parts. This is coupled with a soundrack that just doesn't fit, doesn't serve any purpose apart from to be irriatingly disonant from what you're seeing.

I'm going to try and pretend I didn't waste my life watching this. 

Grade:

Stupid ASDA.....

~Aim

And the award for...

The suckfest film that inspired us to start our blog goes to...none other than...

Grave Encounters (2011)

That has to be worth an applause. We found this film on the Asda top DVD-chart and thought we'd give it a try. That was a mistake, it was only a waste of time and all the DVD is good for is as a frisbee disc.

Grave Encounters was written and directed by "The Vicious Brothers" and when I saw that my sucksense started tingling. If someone doesn't want to put their name on something, but rather use something like "The Vicious Brothers", there has to be something wrong with it.

The plot is simple and could have been so much better. I won't go into details but here's the set up.

A production crew that works for a ghost hunting show gets a tip about a disused mental hospital that is supposedly haunted. They decide to lock themselves in and spend a night recording things. Mysterious paranormal activity starts and it rapidly gets worse.
(It's a good start and it gets you interested but it's been done before though, like everything else in this film, in for example 1408*.)

I have a feeling that the writers/directors were trying to stuff this film full of stuff from horror films that they like. Even though the base plot is simple and worth so much more than this film they manage to screw up royally. There's too many characters none of them really memorable and there's too many different "scary" ideas. The film is such a jumble of things and they're so poorly executed that I was laughing through long parts of it. I have to admit that there was one or two scenes that made me jump a little but those were cheap scares.

Is it worth watching then?
If you have nothing better to do and have watched every other horror ever made, then yes. If I ever had to chose between this film and any other horror ever made, I'd pick any other horror ever made seven days a week.

Grade:

~ Chris

*Horror film from 2007 based on a Stephen King short story and directed by Mikael Håfström.