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Picking the rare gems out of a sea of crap.... so you don't have to!

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Evil Pleasures

Movie Review: Daybreakers

March 5th 2010 02:46


Premise: An infection originally from bats spreads through humanity, turning the majority of humanity into vampires. These vampires then enslave most of the remaining human populace, using them as living blood farms. However, there is not nearly enough blood to go around, and without fresh blood the vampires devolve into mindless mutant bat-people, the wicked looking Subsiders.


Enter Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a human-sympathising vamire blood doctor working for the corporation that runs the blood farms, headed by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Dalton sympathises with the humans, and wants to create a blood substitute to eliminate vampire dependance on them as a food source, allowing them to be freed. I won't give away much more than that, but the plot revolves around Dalton's compassion for humanity and his fight for their survival.

Now, this is the Spierig brothers' follow-up to 2003's brilliant horror-comedy Undead (quite possibly the best Aussie movie I've seen), and needless to say my hopes were pretty damn high going in to this one. Unfortunately, this movie is not as funny or as original as Undead. That being said, however, this is most definitely not a bad movie.

Acting: Solid. Ethan Hawke does a good job as the conflicted vampire haemotologist,
and Sam Neill is a great Evil Boss character. The main rogue human (Claudia Karvan) and Edward's polar-opposite brother Frankie (Michael Dorman) both put in convicinging performances. However, my hat goes off (and it usually does) to Willem Defoe as Elvis, the comic-relief gung-ho cowboy human renegade with a crossbow and an attitude. He comes out with some truly quality lines (eg. When Edward asks him "is this place safe?" he replies "Living in a world where vampires are the dominant species is about as safe as bare backing a 5 dollar whore"). You can tell that the Spierigs had alot of fun with Elvis, and the audience does too. He's a pretty central character, and Defoe plays him perfectly (as he usually does).


Effects: Mind-numbingly excellent.
. The highlight in the effects department are the Subsiders, who look truly horrific (like a deformed mutant vampire should). As you can see from the picture, these vamps are pretty nasty, and I love the irony of a vampire plague affecting a plague of vampires. It's a (very, very) welcome break from the la-di-da fairy princess (Twighlight) vampires that seem to have been dominating the scene lately. Creature effects aside, the rest of the effects were top-knotch as well. The gore was plentiful (especially towards the climax), and very well done.

Direction & Script: Normally I would judge these separately, but considering the Spierigs both wrote and directed it, it seems only fair. This movie, while not being genre-defining, is just good. Yes, I do have a few qualms with it; some of the dialogue was a bit thin, and I felt the whole sub-plot involving Sam Neill's daughter, while important, felt a bit rushed. But these are minor criticisms with what is overall a very impressive offering. Not since Eskalofrio can I remember a movie which so effectively used the interplay between light and darkness to effectively shape the mood, and the movie is all the better for it. From what I have read, alot of people think they have spotted a whole mess of plot holes; actually, if you look a little closer these people are, in fact, idiots. This movie has very few problems in terms of the script. For example; in one scene, we see Hawke's clothes in a mirror, as the vampire is invisible, and in another he is adjusting his clothes in another mirror. However, if you pay attention, you will notice that the second mirror is actually a small camera with a TV. It's little details like that that help make this movie great to watch.

So, overall, a great vampire romp. Definitely more enjoyable than watching all the teen vampire crap that has been shoved down our throats in recent times, and easily my favourite vampire flick since 30 Days of Night.
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Posted By: Someone - Category: Vampire, Great Horror
   


2009: The Worst of the Worst

January 1st 2010 01:46
Well, it seems the 'Best of 2009' posts are a dime-a-dozen these days, so with that in mind I present to you the Evil Pleasures God-Awful Craptacular '09!

In order to make it on to this prestigous and exclusive list, a movie must be so terrible, so despicable, so ... awful, that it makes your eyes hurt and your nose bleed, and just watching it is enough to drain both your intelligence and your will to live.

I'm not limiting this list to movies released in '09, oh no. This is movies that I have watched this year, some new releases, so old 'classics'. Don't like it? I don't care.

Let's get the ball rolling with The Final Destination. My, what a fucking disaster this one was. Poor acting, lame effects, and a plot with more holes than the PGA circuit. Congratulations, fucknuts, you ruined a decent franchise. Then again, didn't we all see that coming?

Speaking of franchises that should have been laid to rest, I'm going to include Saw VI on the list, even though I haven't seen it. I don't have to see it: Some people get killed gruesomely, the plot is pathetic, and there's some lame twist half-heartedly thrown in at the end. And before you ask... yes, I know what I'm saying is freakishly accurate, and yes I am a little bit of a psychic.

It seems that the worst movies this year are all the franchises. From continuations that should never have happened, we move on to the other, evil-er side of the franchise demon: Reboots. Yes, I am talking about the Friday the 13th remake, although I wish I wasn't. Jason Voorhees is arguably one of, nay, THE greatest horror villain of all time. And before all you Freddy Krueger fan-boys start your girly high pitched whining, I'm going to cut your right off: Freddy has big metal fingernails. Oooooh, scary.

Back to the movie: Don't watch it. Don't let your friends watch it. Go and watch the original, or any of the original series. Even Freddy Vs Jason was better than this piece of trash. Just... abysmal.

I'm going to take a short break from the general trashiness. I must give a shoutout to Rob Zombie, and the work he has done on Halloween. It took watching Friday the 13th to realize just how completely Zombie could have fucked up, and my respect for him for not doing so is steadily increasing.

Having watched Halloween 2 recently, I am actually quite impressed with Zombie's work. Forget the fact that it's a Halloween movie, ignore just how far off the reservation he goes and how much he deviates from the original storyline, and you have a pretty damn entertaining horror romp, with some truly cringe-worthy kills and some gnarly effects.

Yes, I have issues with what he's done to the storyline. I would enjoy these movies alot more if they used the same story with different characters... but they're still decent movies.

Anyway, thinking of all these crap movies is making my head hurt. I'll come back to this later.
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Movie Review: The Final Destination

December 22nd 2009 11:37


Premise: A group of friends are watching a car race, when one has a vision of a freak accident that results in several cars crashing, destroying part of the stadium and killing a fair chunk of the audience. He leads his group and a few others to safety, avoiding their deaths. However, Death isn't finished with them just yet, and they will have to find a way to save themselves before Death catches up with them.

Now, I liked the first Final Destination. It was a good premise, the deaths were fun and inventive, its was just a good, fun movie. The second one; nothing new, but still a fun ride. To be honest, I didn't bother with the 3rd, but I can imagine it was more of the same and didn't wander hopelessly astray like FD.

To sum it up: This movie is crap. Pure, unadulterated crap. My personal highlight of the movie was getting to see Justin Welborn, who to date I have only seen in excellent low budget flicks (The Signal, The Other Side and Dance of the Dead, if you must know). Seeing him in it gave me hope that this might hopefully not be as bad as I feared.... But it was. Thankfully his character was killed off early, so my memory of him is not tarnished by this attrocity.

Acting: Terrible. Crap. Awful. Insert any expletive you can think of here, trust me, it's applicable.

Script: I suppose by the 4th installment of any series you will have to expect some decline in quality... I mean, who has enough ideas to carry a series that far? But this is just a piss-poor attempt to milk the final drops of money out of a dead franchise.

The thing about a movie series is... you have to obey the rules. If things are a certain way in the first movie, you can't randomly change the rules in the 4th movie without leaving the audience scratching their heads. Well, I was left scratching my head until I drew blood.

******** HERE BE SPOILERS ********

For example: The whole premise of the movie is that Death is trying to wipe these kids out to restore the natural order of things. The kids aren't meant to be alive, and so freak chances will kill them so that life can go on as it was meant to. That's the GOLDEN Final Destination rule. You HAVE to play by that rule, right? WRONG! In this movie, the writers obviously thought 'fuckit, we're sick of having to make sense, so we're just going to ignore the dogma of the last 3 movies and make our own rules!'. In order to kill off the last few kiddies, there's a massive explosion that wipes out half a cinema, and then half a mall, just to nail the kids.

"But wait", I hear you cry. "Those other innocent bystanders weren't meant to die! Death can't kill them without upsetting it's own natural order! That doesn't make any sense!"

That's absolutely correct. However, Mr. Writer Man gets paid regardless of whether he makes sense or not, and obviously making a quality script would have interfered with him snorting coke out of a hooker's ass, so he didn't bother.

More plot holes: Apparently everything in the movie, visions and death-avoidance included, happened so that the final 3 kids could all be sitting in a cafe to get hit by a truck. I say: BALLS! Apparently the writers think they are oh-so-clever because they can insert a final twist into the movie, even though it doesn't make any sense at all.... personally I blame all that coke they've been snorting. It's like an assassin standing over a target, letting him go, and then coming back later and killing him... with absolutely no reason for letting the target go in the first place. Perfectly logical, right?

It gets even friggin' worse. There's a whole scene in a barber shop where there's a loose fan, and a can of hair spray that magically moves into a hot hair straightener. The can explodes, and flies straight into the fan, knocking it off the roof, where it falls... straight at the victim's feet. It's not like Death has bad aim; the victim was sitting in a barbers chair. The victim then gets up and leaves, but gets hit in the eye by a flying rock.

"But that just sounds like the writers were stupid and added the hair spray rocket for no reason at all! Why would they do that!?"

Why, indeed.

Effects & Death Scenes: Always the highlight of FD Movies... these were still disappointing. Very disappointing, actually. The CGI was bad, the props were bad, everything was just bad.

I am sitting here, trying to think of the redeeming qualities of this movie. EVERY movie has a redeeming feature, right? Some are funny, some have some hot sex, some have a memorable death scene... FD4 really has none of the above. There are tits, but only for about 5 seconds. There is death, but the lame effects and predictability make them far from memorable. In fact, the defining quality of FD4 is it's all-around, 10/10, perfect score crappiness.

Stay away from this movie if you value your time, you sanity, or your taste in quality cinema. My first thought when the credits started rolling was... I'm glad I watched a pirated copy and didn't contribute a cent to this abomination. I've wasted my time; please don't waste yours.
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Posted By: Someone - Category: Psychological, Absolute Trash
   


F*ck you Murphy and your stupid law.

December 8th 2009 00:36
Murphy's law is, basically, the bane of my existance.

Right after I got back into full reviewing mode, BAM, my computer has a hissy fit and dies. Couple that with a new job, and EvilPleasures has taken a backseat


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Hiatus? What Hiatus?

October 9th 2009 10:31
Ah, the calls of real life. How they distract you from what's truly important... like reviewing B-grade horror movies. However, I am now determined to find the time to keep this site regularly updated, so expect the flow to resume.

So don't you worry, my children. Daddy's home.
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Screamers: The Hunting

October 9th 2009 10:13


Premise: Following on from the original Screamers, a group of army-type people must return to Sirius 6B to investigate a distress beacon. They get there and start dying. cough *Aliens* cough


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Movie Review: District 9

August 17th 2009 14:06


Premise: Aliens land on Earth, with their ship settling to hover above Johannesburg. Instead of a delegation or an army, it appears the aliens are refugees and their ship has shut down. They are moved to a camp beneath the ship, which quickly devolves into a slum, walled in and ruled by gangs. Fast forward 20 years, and inter-species tensions are at breaking point. Seeking to control the situation, the government hires MNU (Multi-National United) to evict the million aliens, and move them to another camp further outside the city, where they will not cause so many problems


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Movie Review: Push

August 17th 2009 13:00
Before I begin, I know Push isn't a horror movie, and as such probably doesn't belong here. However, since I am the Alpha and the Omega, I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyway.


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Why Sy-Fy Is Dead To Me: A review of Snakehead Terror

August 14th 2009 23:47
Part 2 of the Sci-Fi Channel Crock of Shit Double Feature Extravaganza!


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Movie Review - Locusts: The 8th Plague

July 21st 2009 03:40


Part 1 of the Sci-Fi Crock-Of-Shit Double Whammy!
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