The Serpent and the Rainbow

Dennis Alan, a Harvard anthropologist, heads down to Haiti to look for a drug used in zombification rituals, hoping to find the next super anesthetic. With the help of Dr. Marielle Duchamp, Dennis locates Christophe Durand, a man who had been pronounced dead several years earlier and who has since become a local legend. Dennis' quest for the drug is complicated after he runs up against Captain Dargent Peytraud, a high ranking member of the secret police, who warns Dennis to leave Haiti or face consequences worse than death. The Serpent and the Rainbow has some amazing locations and great camera work, but seems to be missing some connective tissue. Overdubbed narration is used several times to smooth over some of the gaps, but some scenes are still awkwardly joined. 

Rating: 62%

(Image from IMDB)

Leprechaun in the Hood

aka Leprechaun 5: In the Hood

Mack Daddy and his associate Slug stumble upon the Leprechaun and his gold in a hidden room. 20 years later, with the help of the Leprechaun's magic flute, Mack Daddy has become a powerful and feared rap music mogul. But all hell breaks loose after a trio of aspiring rappers break into Mack Daddy's place and remove a magic amulet from around the Leprechaun's neck. To give credit where credit is due, Leprechaun in the Hood is better than Leprechaun 4: In Space. It was a pretty low bar to clear, but Leprechaun in the Hood managed to pull it off. It's still a bad movie littered with corny rhymes and tasteless jokes, so it hasn't strayed too far from the other entries in the series but, again, at least it's better than Leprechaun 4: In Space.

Rating: 56%

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Sadness

 

Sorry I missed a day - I was too busy to watch any spooky movies. Well let me make up for it with this parade of brutality! A government mismanaged response to a pandemic (lol oops) and everybody gets a plague that turns them into murder and sex crazies. On Shudder they had a special warning about gore and violence that they never do (it’s Shudder ffs) if that gives you any idea about how off rails this movie is. 

RATING: 79%

I Walked with a Zombie

Betsy, a young Canadian nurse, takes a job at a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. Her patient, Jessica Holland, is in a trance-like state. Jessica breathes and walks but is otherwise comatose. After conventional medicine fails to improve Jessica's condition, Betsy seeks aid from a voodoo priest. Betsy's gambit lights a fuse that ultimately blows up a family and puts her face to face with the living dead. I Walked with a Zombie plays like a melodrama, with Betsy uncovering love triangles and deception everywhere she goes. It's incredibly stylish, which is no surprise since it was put together by the same folks that made Cat People. If you're interested in the pre-George Romero era of zombie films, it's worth a watch. Maybe even on a double bill with 1932's White Zombie. Otherwise, it's more of a slow but striking curiosity.

Rating: 64%

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Girl With All The Gifts

A young girl born a zombie helps lead a platoon of soldiers and mean scientists across Zombie England, one of those constant locations for horror flicks these days. Anyway, I don't like fast zombies but the kid angle of the whole thing is pretty well done.

RATING: 70%

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar

This half of the movie Two Evil Eyes, for which Romero and Dario Argento each adapted a Poe story. Anyway, while trying to hide a hypnotized dead body, a doctor and his mistress accidentally put ghosts into the corpse, and believe me, you don't want ghosts in a corpse!

RATING: 44%

Enterprise S3E5 - "Impulse"

Still in the space Bermuda Triangle, the Enterprise finds a Vulcan ship adrift in an asteroid belt, a promising premise that quickly devolves into a zombie episode.

RATING: 40%

Resident Evil: Retribution

Not exactly sure who is retributing who here, but for this series of movies I guess having your title sound like the name of a nu-metal album is more important than having it make sense. Speaking of making sense, Alice, our stalwart hero, finds herself captured by the Umbrella Corporation (UMB [NYSE] $12.84 -3.81). She must fight her way through a buncha computer simulations to escape, and if there's any truth in the world it's that nothing is more fun than watching somebody play a shitty video game for two hours! In the end it turns out the true monster is man, specifically the man who greenlit five fucking Resident Evil movies.

RATING: 26%

Resident Evil: Afterlife

It's the fourth movie in the Resident Evil series and you're watching it because, I dunno, you wanna be the cool aunt and you're babysitting your ten year old goth niece or something? There's not really a good other reason to get caught up in these flicks (I mean, a non-blog related reason). So in this one Alice gets de-superpowered, ends up in LA with some jerky survivors with whom she must make her way to a floating oil tanker that promises safe haven. Now, question - why if all of humanity is basically destroyed does the evil Umbrella corporation keep running military experiments to sell to the now non-existant governments? Answer - cuz heavy metal, dude, kablow, did you see that one zombie get totally shot in the face?

RATING: 45%

Resident Evil: Extinction

You know what's pretty irritating - when a movie series of more than two films decides to forgo the traditional, lame "numbering" in favor of just a colon and an "extreme" title like "Apocalypse" or "Extinction." Well now I gotta keep looking up which movie is next on the list to watch, idiot movie execs! Anyway, this movie is beautifully shot, using a Mad Max style desert wasteland to great cinematic effect. Now Alice has to help a group of escapees get to a promised land in Alaska but oh no! The Umbrella corporation is, uh, cloning her and also there's an evil super scientist that stands in her way. I am watching these movies because it's Halloween season, but they are not horror flicks, just action movies that happen to have zombies in them.

RATING: 51%

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

This sequel picks up where the first left off - Alice (Milla Jovavich) wakes up in a hospital bed after an unknown amount of time to discover (gasp!) there's a zombie apocalypse! I mean, a Resident Evil Apocalypse! The virus has spread into Raccoon City, and it's up to a small group of adventurers featuring our old friend Alice, Jill Valentine, a pimp played by Mike Epps, and a generic white cop I can't even remember the name of. The plot is ludicrous but the action is pretty good - Alice now has superpowers because she got injected with Zombie Dust when she was asleep. Anyway, she has to beat the rocket launcher boss from Resident Evil 3, and whereas I had to have a backpack full of herbs and ammo to do so circa 2001, she manages to do it by making him feel feelings. So that's what the red herb was for!

RATING: 52%

Resident Evil

(In a continuation of me and Quammy's Halloween tradition, I am going to review two horror franchises, starting with everybody's favorite video game adaptation, Resident Evil!)

Everybody hates this movie, and I can sort of see why - it suffers from a lot of the problems of early 2000s action movies (including CGI that looks faker than the original Playstation One game, confusing storyline, needless SWAT guys in heavy armor), and strays pretty far from the source material. At the time avoiding zombies for half the film was a detriment, but now, in 2014, years after we've reached Peak Zombie, that is totally fine. Anyway, we all know the plot - a virus leaks and an evil corporation tries to cover it up but that doesn't exactly go so well! I'd also like to point out that this movie franchise is the longest running theatrical action franchise to feature a woman in the lead (apart from Underworld, and that actually might be it), so extra points for that.

RATING: 57%

The Beyond

Lucio Fulci is a great Italian horror director who prefers to assault the reader with surreal moments of intense violence or beauty rather than create any sort of narrative. In The Beyond, one of his most beloved (?) films, there's, like, a house in Louisiana with a door to the titular the beyond? I'm not entirely sure and I've seen it a few times. Well, some spiders eat an eyeball out of somebody's face and there's some zombies and etc, what more do you want?

RATING: 79%

V/H/S/2

So I didn't really like the first movie in this anthology series, but then a few different people told me the sequel was worth it because there was one great segment included. Unfortunately, every person forgot which number segment it was so I was doomed to watch this whole movie. Like the first one, some people are compelled for some reason to watch a bunch of snuff films, which, despite the fact that this takes place in modern times and every individual short film was shown in context to be shot digitally, have all been transferred down to big ol' unreliable VHS copies. Anyway, there's a boring ghost one, a boring zombie one, A TOTALLY BONKERS AMAZING SHORT HORROR FILM THAT DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE PACKAGED IN THIS SHITTY DEAL, and a boring alien one. Just watch the third segment and you'll be fine.

RATING: 85% (Third segment)
RATING: 26% (Whole movie)

Re-Animator

This crazy med school student named Herbert West thinks he can bring the dead back to life with a glowing green potion. He thinks this because he actually can I guess, except the people are usually sorta psychotic and murdery when he brings them back. The movie is shot kinda blandly, which is what happened in the 80s for almost every movie, but the gore and comedy (goredy?) are pretty good if you are making me come to a determination on this movie's worth and etc.

RATING: 71%

Dead Rising

The idea sounds mighty appealing, a journalist trapped in a mall filled with zombies. I love the variety of tasks; save people, take pictures of the shit going down, uncover a mystery and whack the hell out of zombies with anything you can find. But I spent most of this game getting pissed off because of all the random psychopaths. Why am I getting shot at by some convicts or a shotgun-wielding redneck? Can't we all get along until the zombie attack is over? Having only one save space is annoying as all hell too. Rating: 68%

I Was A Teenage Zombie

This is one of those weird shitty movies like Redneck Zombies that although it is bad and was made for no money, it still has a sort of charm that makes it legitimately (non-MST3K style) enjoyable. The plot is some guys accidentally turn their drug dealer into a crazed zombie and they have to stop him from killing all of them. Great post-punk soundtrack don't hurt nobody neither.

RATING: 59%

The Video Dead

Speaking of evil televisions, here's a movie about a haunted television that zombies crawl out of to kill you or be your friend. I sort of thought the fake movie in the movie "Zombie Blood Nightmare" was a well done imitation of Night of the Living Dead, but everything else sucks about this movie. Like, if they don't act scared the zombies just want to hang out and eat chili and go dancing. Also, there's a murder scene but they couldn't afford cop cars or cop costumes so there's just a red flashing light off screen and sound effects of policemen talking and their radios periodically going off. Let's not judge this movie bad because of economic status, though, hasn't Occupy Wall Street taught us anything? Let's judge it bad because of general terribleness.

RATING: 49%

Dawn Of The Dead

#1 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

So the number one pick for my list shouldn't be a surprise to basically anyone who knows me, because I've made every one of my friends watch this at least once. This horror movie sequel to Night of the Living Dead imagines a zombie apocalypse that disintegrates society more and more, so a quartet decide to hole up in a shopping mall where - oh, why am I even explaining this to you? The blood is a weird color and it's a rough movie in construction, but the writing, atmosphere and characterization are the best. No movie makes me feel better watching it than this one. If you haven't seen it, and I can't imagine that's true since the site's audience is mainly people I've probably forced this movie on before, then you really need to go rent it from wherever even rents movies anymore, pronto buster.

RATING: 100%

Survival Of The Dead

Another George Romero zombie movie, and perhaps a chance to redeem himself after Diary of the Dead. The plot here is a couple of Irish families have conflict on an island off the coast of Delaware? Ugh, we get it, we get it, we're the real bad guys. Also all of the gore is computer generated and looks tres fake.

RATING: 43%