Fangoria's FrightFest Movie / DVD Review Roundup
Fangoria's FrightFest Movie / DVD Review Roundup
A quick glance at The Haunting (No-Do), Hunger & Road Kill
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Thanks to Fangoria, you can choose the fate of 8 killer flicks (not to be confused with the 8 Films to Die For) this summer — all you need to do is go to their website - FangoriaFrightFest.com - view the trailers, rate and click. The movie with the highest score will win a theatrical release. All the films will be released on demand, DVD, Blu-ray and whatever other film-viewing technologies are out there.
The films are:
Dark House - click here to read our review
Fragile [review coming soon]
Grimm Love - click here to read our review
Hunger [review below]
Pig Hunt - click here to read our review
Road Kill [review below]
The Haunting [review below]
The Tomb - click here to read our review
The Haunting (aka, No-Do)
This ghostly chiller out of Spain was inspired by the Catholic Church’s documentation of actual, unexplained supernatural phenomena in the 1940s and focuses on a new mother driven to madness by restless young souls.
When Francesca and Pedro, both physicians, welcome their first baby into the world, all logic and reason is thrown out with the bathwater and they decide to move into a haunted old ex-orphanage — which is a great place for Francesca to deal with her post-partum depression. Hm, seemed like a good idea at the time!
There is a lot of spooky-saturated imagery and atmosphere in The Haunting, as it's a pretty faithful amalgam of several British, American, and Japanese ghost stories and films — but there's the gothic Spanish twist, adding lush layers of Catholic symbolism as only the Romantic filmmakers can (Think: The Orphanage, then lower your expectations a notch or two).
The spooky dolls and creepy apparitions of the dead kids are well-rendered and attention-grabbing. Unfortunately, there are several poorly interpreted and quite unfathomable plot twists, making The Haunting feel a bit like dragging chains toward the end.
Hunger
The Milgram Experiment meets Saw as conducted by the Donner Party in this psychological horror film about several strangers thrown together in a confined space and left to starve.
I found the film dark, trite, and rather uninspired. It's the same old story most horror fans have seen a dozen times, but the trick is to put a twist on it — and in this case, if it was there it was too dark to see it in the murky dungeon.
Road Kill
A group of teenagers embark on a road trip and find themselves menaced by a giant and murderous truck in the Australian outback. In a film like this, where the action is the star and the psychological aspect takes a backseat, the clichés are not only OK: they're embraced.
Like a twisted version of The Car, Maximum Overdrive and Road Games, Road Kill takes little artistic license in adapting some of the best 'splat!' death scenes… but it's all good (for a Sunday drive, only; Road Kill isn't a keeper).
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Reviews by Staci Layne Wilson