The Friday Night Horror Movie: Demon Knight (1995)

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When I was in college, I went to the movies pretty much every weekend. Sometimes two or three times. I saw absolutely everything that I had even the slightest amount of interest in. I probably did have interest in Demon Knight when it came out, as I liked horror comedies. But I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is watching it in the theater and absolutely loving it.

Demon Knight is branded as a Tales From the Crypt story. Tales From the Crypt originated as an anthology horror comic in the 1950s and was hosted by the Crypt-Keeper, a wise-cracking corpse. It has been revised in various formats over the years, including an HBO series that lasted from 1989 to 1996. I’d never read any of those comics, and I don’t think I’d watched any of the HBO episodes, but the Crypt-Keeper would pop up in commercials and things, so I was definitely familiar with the brand.

Demon Knight was successful enough that they commissioned a sequel, Bordello of Blood, which came out a year later. I hated that film. So much so that it completely turned me off the whole Tales From the Crypt thing, and I never watched anything from them again. I never even came back to Demon Knight. So I haven’t seen it in 30 years.

It is one of those films I’d periodically think about, and I’d think I should revisit it, but for whatever reason I never did. It seems to be a movie that’s more or less been forgotten by the culture. I never see anyone talking about it. There are lots of other movies like this – some I did watch when they came out, some I didn’t – that get brought up periodically in online discussions. Those I usually seek out and watch again. But the lack of discussion about this one meant that anytime it would pop into my mind, it usually popped right back out again.

I cut the cord years and years ago. I own a lot of DVDs, but I do subscribe to various streaming services. I’m one of those people who subscribes to one service for a month or two, and then I’ll cancel it so I can subscribe to something else. I figure there is only so much stuff you can watch in any given month, so why spend all your money subscribing to every service?

A couple of months ago, Starz had one of those super deals where you could subscribe to an entire year for like $20. I’ve subscribed to Starz before and remembered it being okay, so I signed up. Tonight is the first time I’ve actually watched anything on their service since I subscribed. Most of the stuff they have is of no interest to me, and the stuff I am interested in I’ve already seen and own on DVD.

But while looking for a horror movie to watch, I found this and decided to finally give it another go. Actually, what I really did was watch The Mothman Prophesies on Starz, the Richard Gere flick from 2002, but it was so god-awful I decided I didn’t want to write about it for my Friday Night Horror Movie, and I dug around Starz some more and found this.

For the first ten minutes or so I wished I hadn’t. This was not what I was wanting; my fears that it would not live up to my memories were coming true. But then I was able to click my brain off. I was able to enjoy the film for what it was actually doing, not what I wanted it to do.

What it does is create an incredibly goofy, violent, goopy, and funny little horror story with lots of comedic elements and some pretty good practical effects. Billy Zane is having the time of his life, too.

Zane plays a demon called The Collector, who is after a guy named Frank Brayker (William Sadler). Brayker has a powerful artifact known as the key, which the demons need to take over the world, but which also contains some of Christ’s blood, which can kill the demons.

Brayker holes up in an old mission turned hotel, and the film becomes a base-under-siege story. Also in the hotel are an assortment of people, including the sassy owner (CCH Pounder), an old man (Dick Miller), an ex-con (Jada Pinkett Smith), an asshole (Thomas Haden Church), and others.

The film doesn’t do anything particularly new with the concept. There is lots of infighting, attempts to sneak away, and a traitor, but it does it with gusto and a real sense of fun. I remember when I first watched it, one of the joys was watching Thomas Haden Church play a character completely different from the good natured goof he played on the TV show Wings. Here he cusses, drinks, and has a prostitute attach battery clamps to his nipples!

The demon designs are good, and it is a real treat to see how many practical effects they used. CGI was just getting started at this point, and there is some use of it here, but mostly the demons are made of real stuff, and the gore is visceral (and the blood was made out of glow stick juice!).

This is a film that understands it isn’t going to win awards. The Oscars will not be calling. But it does what it does well and has a blast doing it. I had a lot of fun watching it, too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Memoir of a Murderer (2017)

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My father has Alzheimer’s. It is early stages yet, so things are mostly okay. He sometimes forgets things that he’s just done, or other little details, but he always knows where he is and who I am. His father had it as well, and I watched Grandpa go through its entire course. It was awful. He often didn’t know who his wife or his children were. He’d forget where he was and what he was doing. He started hoarding money. It is an awful, awful disease.

As it turns out, it can also be a pretty good twist in a South Korean thriller.

Byeong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) killed his father when he was a teenager. The father was a horrible man who often beat Byeong-soo and his sister. When the cops never came to get him, Byeong-soo began to believe the murder was justified. And then he began thinking maybe other murders would be justified. He became an avenging angel, murdering anyone he felt deserved it.

The years rolled by, and the bodies piled up. But then he had an accident, and it did something to him. Dementia came next, and a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. He often has blackouts, and his memory is not so good. He stopsed killing and becomes a model citizen and loving father.

His daughter, Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun), knows nothing of his past. She cares for him and gives him a little microrecorder that he can use to record everything he does in a day. This, she thinks, will help his memory.

One day he gets into a fender bender with a man named Min Tae-joo (Kim Nam-gil). This causes Min Tae-joo’s trunk to pop open. There is something wrapped in plastic inside, and blood is dripping to the road. Min Tae-joo says it is a deer he hit earlier, but Byeong-soo recognizes human blood when he sees it and the cold look in Min Tae-joo’s eyes. This man, he knows, is a killer. More than that, he knows he must be the man who has been killing young women in his province. Three bodies have already shown up.

Ah, but Min Tae-joo also recognizes a killer when he sees one and decides to play a game. He discovers Byeong-soo has a daughter and begins to woo her. He sneaks into his house and reads his journal. Suddenly it is serial killer versus serial killer, except one of them can’t remember who he is half the time.

The film never really manages to rise above that pulp plot. The dementia angle adds some interesting twists. It creates a sort of unreliable narrator. The film is told through Byeong-soo’s point of view, so sometimes we’ll see something happen, and then he’ll question whether or not it was real, thus making us wonder the same thing. But it is also used a few too many times as a plot device. Beyong-soo will come close to killing Min Tae-joo, but then his eye will twitch (the film’s indication that he’s having an episode), and he’ll get away.

It mostly plays his Alzheimer’s as a plot device, as something to add an edge to the proceedings. We get a feel for how it affects Eun-hee, and there is a cop friend of Byeong-soo who reacts with astonishment whenever he either cannot remember him or he actually does. I can’t really complain that the film doesn’t spend a lot of time with the emotionality of dealing with that disease, as I’m not sure if I’d be able to take it. And it isn’t that it’s handled poorly here, but this is definitely not a feel about that disease and its effects on both those who have it and those that must take care of them.

Min Tae-joo is a fairly generic villain. He’s your typical basic cable serial killer. He is a cop in this one, so that’s interesting, except the film doesn’t really delve very deeply into that angle. Sul Kyung-gu is excellent as our anti-hero, and the film remains quite entertaining and thrilling. The final fight scene is well staged, and I mostly dug the entire film. But it’s never anything more than you expect.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Halloween (1978)

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I don’t remember the first time I watched John Carpenter’s Halloween. I don’t think I saw it while in high school; it was probably college that found me first seeing it. Whenever it was, I’ve seen it many times since. It has become part of my DNA. I love it deep down in my bones. So I was surprised to realize that I’ve never actually written about it. I’ve written about several of the sequels and the remakes, but never the original. I’ve gotten into the habit over the last several years of watching one of the Halloween movies on Halloween, so I decided it was high time I watched the original on this, the spookiest of evenings, and then finally wrote something about it.

Reading some of my other Halloween reviews, I find that I’ve talked quite a lot about Carpenter’s film and its place in popular culture, so I don’t want to go too heavy in that direction here. Though it is often cited as the first slasher, you can actually go back as far as Psycho and Peeping Tom (both released in 1960) to find films that fit the mold. Italian giallos certainly had a lot of influence over the slasher genre and could even be considered slashers themselves. Technically Black Christmas, a very good slasher itself, was released a few years before Halloween. But it was Carpenter’s film that popularized the genre and solidified the tropes.

While this is true, I would argue that Friday the 13th (1980) truly solidified everything the slasher would become over the remaining decade. Sean S. Cunningham was clearly inspired by Halloween‘s success, and he distilled the Carpenter film down to its very essence. It has a group of sexy teens getting killed off one by one by a blade-wielding maniac. The final girl is virginal and thus pure in the film’s point of view. The killings all stem from something in the killers’ past. Etc. Even the title is taking the holiday premise from Carpenter. Friday the 13th takes the tropes established in Halloween and grinds them down, then exploits the hell out of them. The sex and nudity are more gratuitous, the violence more gore-filled.

Carpenter is on record stating that the notion that Laurie Strode survives Halloween due to her “purity” was purely accidental. And it’s true, Laurie isn’t some paragon of virtue. We see her smoking in one scene, and she doesn’t seem opposed to drinking or the fact that her friends are screwing their boyfriends at the drop of a hat. Her virginity seems to be more of a product of her own shyness and lack of confidence than any sense of morality. She is a “good girl” in the sense that she tries hard at school and genuinely seems to care about the kids she’s sitting with (unlike one of her friends who constantly yells at her charge and dumps her off at Laurie’s as soon as possible.)

Friday the 13th doubles down on the tropes. Its success led to many more slashers in the ensuing years, and most of them kept the distilled versions of these ideas and codified them.

It is always surprising to me how much Halloween takes its time getting to the killing. There is a murder in the opening flashback and then a long period of nothing. After a fantastic credit sequence (featuring a beautifully lit jack-o’-lantern and that iconic score), we open in 1963. A long POV shot shows us Michael Myers stabbing his sister to death (after she’s had some sexy fun times with her boyfriend). But the sex is off-screen, and the violence is fairly tame. Even the nudity feels not particularly gratuitous.

Then we move to the present day (1978) and find Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) for some reason driving to the asylum where Michael Myers is kept with a nurse in the middle of the night. Michael has escaped, attacks the nurse, and gets away. Dr. Loomis tracks him to his hometown of Haddonfield, IL. Loomis is our expositional bank. He keeps finding people to talk to about how Michael Myers isn’t human, he’s evil incarnate, he’s an unstoppable killing machine. Intercut with his hunt for Michael, we find Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) going to school and hanging out with her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (PJ Soles.) They are typical teenagers. They smoke, they drive around town, and they talk about boys. Laurie gets teased because she cares about her grades and she’s shy around boys, but they genuinely seem to like each other.

In the background is Michael Myers. Standing tall, dressed in coveralls with that weird mask on, just stalking them. We’ll see him driving around, following Laurie. He’s standing outside her bedroom window or her classroom or down the road, but then he’ll quickly disappear. Because Loomis is constantly telling us about how evil Myers is, we feel that tension. Even when Laurie is doing something perfectly boring like making popcorn for the little boy she’s sitting, we know Michael is out there, just waiting to kill her.

The sequels will give Michael Myers a connection to Laurie. This will give him a reason to constantly be coming after her, but in this first film that connection hasn’t been made. His obsession with her is random, and all the more terrifying for it.

When the killings do come, they are fairly tame. There is very little bloodletting or gore. Michael does stab one guy so hard the knife pins him to a wall, and there is another scene in which a body is staged on a bed, and others fall out of closets, but they’d pass a TV edit these days.

But they work because they are so well staged by Carpenter. The way he sets them up and films them, the way he has spent the first 45 minutes setting up Michael Myers as this merciless killer, makes them incredibly effective. Dean Cundey’s cinematography is evocative. A lot of the scenes happen in darkness, but he finds a way to let just enough light in to shine across Michael’s face, or his victims as they flee in terror.

It isn’t a perfect film. There are times when it’s a very small-budget show. You can see some of the seems, but I don’t care. I just love every loving minute of it. It doesn’t get better than Halloween in terms of slashers.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Triangle (2009)

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I don’t know how to write about this without spoiling a main plot point, so reader beware.

I love a good time loop movie. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first one of that type, but it perfected it and popularized it, and now it’s become a genre unto itself. Triangle takes the formula and gives it an interesting twist. Instead of our hero falling asleep and waking up to the same day over and over again (or getting killed and resetting to the beginning of the same day), she stays awake and in the same place while the other characters all die and then get reset and meet her again.

Six people take a sailboat out for a cruise. They mostly don’t know each other but are all connected to Greg (Michael Dorman), who owns the boat. Everybody is excited except Jess (Melissa George), who seems distracted and tired.

Things go well until they don’t. A sudden storm rolls in and capsizes the boat. All but one manage to climb on top of the wreckage. Soon they spot a cruise ship and hail it for help. They climb aboard but find it to be empty. Well, almost empty. They keep getting glimpses of someone, but that person seems to be hiding.

Jess gets increasingly paranoid. She keeps saying she’s been on this boat before. Then people start dying. Someone with a burlap sack over his head starts shooting people. Jess is the only one to survive. As she knocks the killer overboard, the killer says that they’ll be back and the only way to get home is to kill everybody.

Then a song plays over the radio, and Jess sees their capsized boat approaching. Except it isn’t empty; it is full of those original six people, including herself. Now here’s where the movie loses me a little. If it were me, I’d run up to my friends (and myself, I guess) and freak the frack out. I’d probably scare them at first, but I’d try to explain what just happened and let my friends try to figure things out. Jess does not do this. Instead she hides, then slinks around spying on the group. We’re treated to some of the same scenes we just watched but from different angles. She eventually tries to stop her friends from getting murdered. She does manage to change the timeline to varying degrees, but ultimately they all die again.

I know I put a spoiler heading at the top of this, but I don’t want to spoil everything, so I’ll have to let the plot lie right there. In some ways the script is very clever about letting things unfold, and in other ways it is rather stupid. Jess makes some ridiculously bad decisions for no other reason than to let the plot go in the direction the writers wanted it to.

It manages to conclude itself in a very unexpected and yet satisfying manner. It finds a way to do something completely different from all the other time loop movies I’ve seen, and I love that.

In the end I’d call it a good, but somewhat frustrating film, but one well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

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As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been slowly working my way through the classic monster series from Hammer Studios. This is the second film in the Frankenstein series. The first film, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) very loosely adapted the novel from Mary Shelley. Apparently Universal Studios was all too ready to sue them if they adapted it too closely, or if they copied any of their designs for the castles or the monster so it is a very loose adaptation, but a good one.

At the end of that film, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is set to face the guillotine for his crimes. At the beginning of this film, we learn that with the help of a hunchback named Karl (Oscar Quitak) a priest was executed in his place and he escaped. Three years later we find him living in Carlsbrück, Germany as a successful doctor named Victor Stein.

He’s become very popular amongst the rich (much to the chagrin of the medical council (as he refuses to join their club), but he also runs a clinic for the poor. Naturally, he’s also continuing his experiments into creating life (and probably hacking off a few body parts from the poor for that purpose.)

He teams up with Doctor Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) a man who recognises him from his past and is excited about the work he did with reanimation. They will successfully remove Karl’s brain and implant it into a much healthier body. Things go pretty well, until of course they don’t. It wouldn’t be a Frankenstein film if he didn’t wind up going at least a little bit crazy.

The thing I’ve learned about Hammer Horror, especially their early entries, is that they are all about setting a mood. They have these wonderful sets and costumes that look both real and artificial. They create scenes that feel like they take place hundreds of years ago, yet there is an artificiality to it as well. Like you know you are watching a movie, but are still transported anyway.

The plots are often convoluted, and if I’m being honest, a little dull. And it often takes a while for the action and horror to take place, if it even comes at all. This film is like that. There is very little action or violence. It takes an incredibly long time for the monster to do anything. Instead, we spend time with Dr. Stein and Kleve talking about what they are going to do. Stein shows off his lab, which had a rudimentary experiment in it (there is a severed hand in one box of water, and a floating pair of eyes in the other, and they respond to one another).

There is a potential love interest, and some complaining by the board. Etc. It is more like a drama that just happens to have a reanimated corpse in it rather than a straight up horror film, but I still completely dig it.

I find I have to be in a certain mood for these films. You have to let them wash over you and enjoy what they are doing instead of what you might expect. But when you can’t, they are a lot of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

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This is going to be a slight cheat. Obviously, I write a lot of movie reviews for Cinema Sentries. I do it for fun; I don’t get paid for it (I do get free Blu-rays, which is nice.) I’m not sure if I’d want to be in the cultural critic business right now; those folks are having a tough time of it. I’m also happy I don’t have anyone demanding I watch certain things. I review the things I request. I try to keep my requests down to a steady pace, but sometimes I go a little overboard, and I wind up with a stack of Blu-rays sitting on my desk, and that can be overwhelming.

That’s happening to me right now. I have a Blu-ray in front of me that I just watched but need to review. I’ve got another one I’ll hopefully watch later tonight. I have a six-film boxed set of Errol Flynn movies and another boxed set of all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

That’s a lot of movies to watch and review. The Nightmare set is actually on the bottom of the pile, but since tonight is Friday and I always do a horror movie on Fridays, I thought I’d bump the first Nightmare on Elm Street up and kill two birds with one stone.

That also means I won’t be digging too deep into it because I’ll want to save all my best thoughts for the official review.

What I will say is that I love this movie. I grew up in the 1980s, and so slashers are my horror movie sweet spot, and this is one of my all-time favorites. Freddy Kreuger is a horror icon, and this is where he started. In later films he’d become a wise-cracking goof (admittedly a goof that will kill you in the end, but still a goof), but here he’s absolutely terrifying.

It was a stroke of genius having him kill inside of dreams, as that allows the film to eschew the laws of physics and reality. Anything goes, and the film makes good use of that. The imagery here is absolutely iconic. From the wall that turns elastic to the claws reaching up from the bathtub or the stairway steps turning to goo, to Freddy’s outstretched arms, the film is simply loaded with memorable shots. There is a wonderful tactile quality to the film and its use of practical effects. Sometimes that means you can see the filmmaking behind it – you can tell that the goo inside those steps is oatmeal, and when Freddy falls down the stairs, you can see the mattress he lands on—but I much prefer that to the CGI garbage so many modern films rely on.

So, yeah, I love this movie. I will have more to say about it and all of its sequels in a week or so. Look right here in these pages for that link when it comes out.

Funny story, just now as I’m about to post this I have a premonition to do a search of my site for this film, just in case I’d written about it before. I couldn’t remember writing about it, but I write a lot of stuff so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick search.

Friends I wrote a full review of the film (and its release in UHD) just over a year ago!

The Friday Night Horror Movie: What Lies Beneath (2020)

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Robert Zemeckis had an incredible run in the 1980s through the 1990s. It started with Romancing the Stone in 1984 and ran through the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, and Contact. I was a big fan. When I learned he was making a thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I was completely on board. I believe I saw it opening weekend in the theater. I was highly disappointed. I’ve not seen it since.

The Criterion Channel is currently running a bunch of horror films from the 2000s. This is one of them. Lately, I’ve been revisiting films from my youth that I didn’t much care for at the time to see if the decades since might have made me more attuned to their wavelength. This is especially true for films that my critic friends seem to like.

So, I figured it was time to revisit this one and see if I’ve changed my mind. Friends, it still stinks. Well, okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is a bit of a mess.

This is basically Zemeckis doing Hitchcock, but that’s not really a thing in his wheelhouse.

It begins like a Rear Window homage. Claire Spencer (Pfeiffer) and her husband, Norman (Ford) live in a big, beautiful, lakeside house in Vermont. He’s a fancy researcher at a fancy college. She gave up her musical career to be a mom. As the film begins, they are saying goodbye to their daughter, who is headed off to college. Claire is having a hard time with this. She’s lonely and bored.

She notices the new neighbors are often fighting. Loudly. One rainy night she spies him loading something (a big covered something) into the trunk of his car. Did he just murder his wife? Suspicions run even higher when she stops by with a welcoming package and realizes that the wife’s car is in the garage, but she seems to be gone. And the husband is being cagey.

But just as that idea gets going, the film shifts gears. Now Claire is seeing ghosts. She hears whispers, the front door keeps finding itself open, and the bath is filled with hot water when nobody’s home.

All of this works well enough. Ford and Pfeiffer are too good of actors, and Zemekis too talented a director for it not to, but it never rises above. It never quite thrilled me. I never really believed the ghost angle, and without that there isn’t much more to the story. I kept half expecting the neighbor to show back up and to be an actual killer. I think I would have preferred that to what we actually get.

The trailer for the film famously spoils half the movie and the big twist towards the end. I won’t do that in case you haven’t seen it. The first time I watched the film, I felt the ending really killed the film’s momentum, but this time I found the final act to be the most interesting. That’s when Zemeckis goes into full Hitchcock mode, allowing himself to move away from the problematic script (by Clark Gregg!) and into pure direction. Although, I’ll still admit there are some really silly bits to its conclusion.

It isn’t a terrible film, just not a great one. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how this marks the beginning of a downside to the director and his two stars.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Get Away (2024)

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Horror often relies on putting characters in unfamiliar places. They might be somewhere remote and isolated, where help cannot be found. Or maybe they are in a different culture where they do not understand the language or customs. Putting our protagonists somewhere they do not feel safe gives us an immediate sense of dread.

Get Away falls in the tradition of films like The Wicker Man (1973) or Midsommar (2019) where are protagonists are both isolated from the outside world and surrounded by a strange and unfamiliar culture. It then plays with those conventions, subverting them in interesting and fun ways.

Richard (Nick Frost, who also wrote the script) and Susan (Aisling Bea), along with their two children, Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres), are taking a holiday on a tiny island off the coast of Sweden. They are looking forward to the island’s annual celebration of Karantan (where islanders nearly starved to death, resorting to cannibalism due to some forced quarantining).

Before they even arrive at the island, they are given the side-eye by the locals who warn them they won’t be welcomed there. They barely make the last ferry (which naturally won’t return for several days) and arrive on the island where they are greeted by scorn.

The one friendly face, Mats (Eero Milonoff), is the one who rented them the Airbnb, and he turns out to be a pervert, spying on Jessie and stealing her undergarments.

For the first hour, the film relies on the tropes of these sorts of films – miscommunications over cultural differences, an increasing sense of unease – and then it takes a big twist. I won’t spoil it, but unless you really aren’t paying attention, you’ll probably figure it out long before the film wants you to. It is a bit strange that it takes the film so long to get to that twist, because what comes after is where everybody seems to be having the most fun.

At that point, the unease turns into a straight-up gore fest with loads of well-done practical effects and very fun kills.

It is a film that isn’t nearly as clever as it needs to be, or funny, but it isn’t a bad cinematic experience. I like Nick Frost quite a lot, and it’s fun to see him just being weird and having a good time. I just wish I enjoyed myself as much as he seems to have.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sci-Fi In July Edition: Resident Evil (2002)

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I stopped playing video games after things advanced past the Super Nintendo System. Partially, this was because I’d gone to college and found more interesting things to take up my time. Partially, this was because I was now college-aged and expected to purchase things like gaming systems myself, and I had other things to spend my money on. But also, my friend had a Nintendo 64, and when I’d play games on it like GoldenEye, I found I got nauseated.

My brother had a PlayStation, and I believe he owned the first Resident Evil game. I remember playing it a time or two, but it never hooked me in. So when the movie came out, I was none too interested.

I thought I had watched it sometime previously to tonight, but I’ve not logged it in Letterboxd nor rated it on IMDB. Watching it, I found that I had no real memory of it. The opening scene did seem a little familiar, and I definitely knew about a scene where a laser beam cuts some soldiers into pieces. But maybe I saw that in a trailer, or some other clip. Or maybe I started the movie, got halfway through, and decided it was too stupid to finish. I dunno. As I get older, my memory of what I’ve seen and haven’t seen diminishes, and I’m left scratching my head over certain films.

Obviously, none of this matters to anyone, but this is my blog, and I can ramble if I want to.

But on to the actual film. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked and alone in a shower. She seems to have fallen, pulling the shower curtain down with her (to strategically cover up her naked parts, yet reveal enough to get the horny boys most likely to see this movie all excited). She seems to have lost all memory of who she is and what she’s doing there. She sees a picture of herself with a man. They are dressed as if it is their wedding day. She notices a wedding ring on her finger.

Suddenly, a strange man tackles her just as a group of commandos busts into the mansion. The commandos have no time to explain, but take Alice and the man with them to an underground train. There, they find Spence (James Purefoy), the man in that wedding photo, who also says he has amnesia.

Riding the train deeper underground, the commando boss, James Shade (Colin Salmon), explains that they are entering The Hive, a top-secret genetic research facility owned by The Umbrella Corporation. Earlier that day, The Hive’s supercomputer, also known as The Red Queen, mysteriously killed all the people inside The Hive. The Commandos are there to find out why. Alice and Spence are employees of The Umbrella Corporation, tasked to guard the entrance of The Hive, and were only pretending to be married as some sort of cover.

For the first half of the film, our heroes do battle with The Red Queen. It is still on guard and has set deadly traps for anyone trying to get in. That’s where those laser beams come in, plus various other murderous traps.

Once they turn the computer off, they realize the reason it went haywire is that the T-Virus was unleashed, and The Hive had to be shut down lest it contaminate the outside world. The T-Virus turns humans into zombies.

Also, the crazy scientists in The Hive were experimenting with the T-Virus on various creatures, creating super monsters. The rest of our film finds our heroes battling them.

Paul W.S. Anderson directs (I seem to be having an Anderson weekend). Like all of his films that I’ve seen, he does a good enough job directing that I don’t hate what I’m watching, but a poor enough job to make me wonder why I kept with it. He’s competent enough to keep things interesting, but not enough of an artist to ever make me seek him out. Someone should tell him to lay off the CGI, though. It looks bad in all his films, but here especially, since most of the monsters are CGI and they are laughably bad.

He’s helped here by a script that kept the action coming at a steady pace. Jovovich is quite good as the lead; she’s starred in all of the Resident Evil films, and I imagine this is what she will be remembered for. She’s got quite a presence. As does Michelle Rodriguez as one of the commandos. This was just her fourth film, but she completely owns it. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, ranging from pretty good to fairly terrible.

This is a film where, if I have actually seen it before, I can totally understand how I’d forgotten it. It isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly memorable. It is, however, just good enough to make me want to watch the sequel. Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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28 Days Later was one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote for this blog. With the new legacy sequel, 28 Years later, coming out this weekend, I thought it would be fun to revisit the first film and its original sequel 28 Weeks Later.

I find I mostly still agree with my original review of the first film. I like the first half better than the second, but my opinion of the second half improved a little, and my thoughts on the first half declined. I think I appreciate what it was trying to do with the military stuff more, and the zombie stuff no longer feels all that fresh or original.

My memory says I hated the sequel, but I rated it 3.5 stars out of 5, so I guess my feelings were mixed. I didn’t write a review of it, so I don’t have the details of those feelings written down for posterity.

This time around, I mostly liked it.

It begins with completely different characters from those who were in the first film. We find a group of people huddled inside a small but rather fortified cabin, hiding from the zombies. This includes Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The zombies attack, and at first, Don plays the hero, fighting back the zombies while everyone else runs.

But then he runs and ultimately finds himself separated from his wife and a small child. The zombies attack them, and instead of fighting, he runs. We see him fleeing the house while his wife pounds on the window, presumably about to get eaten.

The film spends a lot of time painting that action as completely cowardly and Don as a horrible person. He is completely grief-stricken. The thing is, I kind of found myself on his side. It was a horrible situation, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could have done to save her.

Movies teach us that everybody should always risk their lives to save others, and while that is a noble sentiment, it is also perfectly human to be scared out of your mind in these types of situations, and not always be the hero.

I’m going to avoid spoilers, but something happens to rub that guilt in, and then it totally doesn’t matter because the film takes a different turn.

Anyway, flash forward to 28 weeks later, and the zombies have all died out. They apparently never escaped England, and all the humans either were bitten or escaped. The zombies eventually died of starvation.

Now they are trying to repopulate the country. NATO forces (led by Americans) have set up a fortified camp on the Isle of Dogs, an isolated peninsula near London. Don’s children, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) have just arrived, where they are reunited with Don.

There is some interesting subtext about Americans and militarization. They act like they have complete control of the situation, full of bluster and ego, and then everything goes haywire, and they are mostly completely useless to stop it.

The film takes its time before the zombies come back, but once they do, things kick into high gear. There are several terrific set pieces that I enjoyed a lot more than the original film. 28 Days Later used a lot of handheld camera work, and I often got lost in what was happening to whom, but here the action is much better balanced.

There is a lot of nonsense in where the plot goes, and so many characters make so many dumb decisions, it is hard to take it seriously, but if you can set that sort of thing aside, this makes for a good little zombie sequel. It helps that the cast is completely stacked. Besides those already mentioned, we’ve got Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Harold Perrineau as soldiers and Rose Byrne as a military doctor.