Tag: Splatter

Frankenstein Reborn (2005) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Frankenstein Reborn (2005) – A Movie A Day 2021 #11

Frankenstein Reborn DVD cover

After watching The Curse of Frankenstein, I felt like I might be getting on a Frankenstein movie kick. After watching Frankenstein Reborn, I might be off that kick.

Frankenstein Reborn is a low-budget take on the Mary Shelley’s classic tale. Writer/Director Leigh Scott not only took inspiration from the original novel, but he seems to have drawn upon other adaptations as well as other horror movies in general. That’s all well and good, but the resulting movie isn’t that great. There are some positives here and there, but overall I got kind of bored. 

Let’s focus on the positives though. I mostly enjoyed this new version of Dr. Frankenstein (Victor Franks as played by Rhett Giles). When we first meet Dr. Franks, he is being questioned about a series of murders in an evaluation to see if he’s sane enough to stand trial. I also enjoy the framing of the story with Franks telling us what happened so what we see might not be 100% accurate to what really happened (just like the novel and just like The Curse of Frankenstein).

I also enjoyed a lot of the practical makeup and gore effects. There are some very gruesome and bloody murders in Frankenstein Reborn, and even though the effects look relatively cheap, they’re also a lot of fun. The approach to the gore was to just add more and more blood to cover up any deficiencies in the makeup, and I approve of that mentality. Plus, the creature wasn’t bad to look at. Well, his face was good, but no attention was paid to the rest of his body, so that felt a little odd. But overall, yeah, I enjoyed the effects.

What I didn’t care about so much was the story or how it was told. It starts with Dr. Franks and his assistants using biological nanotechnology (or something) in an attempt to cure a man with a degenerative condition that will leave him completely paralyzed sooner than later. Stuff happens, and the patient is eventually killed and turned into a monstrous creature. And okay, I’ll admit to tuning out at times and probably missing some story bits, but I really don’t think I missed too much. The story is not very deep, and in the end it turns into the creature murdering a few women and then going after Dr. Franks himself. It’s a superficial reworking of the source material that ends up focusing more on stalking and killing than tryig to tackle themes regarding the human condition. Certainly, Frankenstein Reborn is no Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

The editing of the movie was also somewhat off-putting, especially in the beginning. Victor Franks’ tale is told out of sequence for a while, so I was having to think about what happened when while I was still trying to figure out how all of these characters related to each other. That kind of storytelling can work well, but here it just wasn’t grabbing my attention well enough for me to put in much effort to keep up. Maybe that’s my fault, but regardless, that was also a big reason why I started checking out mentally. 

I might give Frankenstein Reborn another shot at some point, but it probably won’t be for a long while. For anyone else vaguely interested, I’d recommend maybe trying out some other Frankenstein movies before venturing into this one. 

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Zombie Fight Club A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Zombie Fight Club (2014) – A Movie A Day 2021 #5

Zombie Fight Club Poster

I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. At least, in theory I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. I love the idea of zombies, and I love the versatility of the sub-genre. Yeah, that’s right, I used the word “versatility” when describing zombie movies. Even if a multitude of zombie movies use essentially the same plot over and over, the potential for variety is definitely there. Some of my absolute favorite movies and television shows of all time include zombies as a main focus, and they range from trashy splatter movies, to hilarious comedies, to historical action/dramas and beyond. The potential metaphors that zombies can be used for are numerous, and in the hands of a skilled set of filmmakers, a zombie movie can have great impact and meaning. But of course, with so many zombie movies having been made over the decades, many of them aren’t going to be so great. Zombie Fight Club falls firmly in the “not so great” category for me.

Zombie Fight Club is a Taiwanese zombie/action movie with lots of blood and guts. All of that sounds good so far, right? Of course it does. On top of that, the movie is filled with beautiful women and men in in skimpy outfits fighting hordes of the undead. So we have all the makings of a nice and trashy zombie movie that emphasizes fun over quality, and on that level I did enjoy Zombie Fight Club. The bloody action was fun, and the practical effects, when they were used, were over the top in a great way. A lot of the bullets and gore were digitally added though, and that was a whole lot less fun for me. I’m just not a big fan of purely digital effects when they look as overly fake as they do here. But then, I love practical effects even when they look fake, so that’s a contradiction I’ve had to learn to live with. Overall though, the action and blood (and skimpy outfits) are easily the best things about the movie, and they make it worth watching for some light entertainment.

My main issues with Zombie Fight Club start right in the title though. You’d think the movie would be about a club of some sort where people fight zombies. Or maybe the zombies fight each other. But what you get for the first hour of the movie is what feels like a riff on the scene in the apartment building towards the beginning of the original Dawn of the Dead. So after a while, I gave up on the “fight club” promise of the title and just settled for “zombie fight” instead.

In this first section, we meet a few different groups of people living in the same apartment building. We’re introduced to a guy and his girlfriend who get some drugs and have a party, what appear to be gang members who have kidnapped someone, and a group of police officers who are coming in to raid the place. People start turning into zombies after taking drugs (even though this doesn’t make a lot of sense given some various factors that I don’t really want to go into), and the building is quickly overrun. Meanwhile, it turns out all but one of the cops are dirty and are just trying to rob and kill the criminals they were sent to take down. The one good cop, Andy, separates from the rest of the officers when everything starts to fall apart, and Andy ends up pairing with the girlfriend of the guy who got the drugs at the beginning of the movie. So for the first hour of the movie, we follow Andy and the girlfriend, Jenny, as they try to survive and escape. We see some of the other people in the various apartments fight and die, but Andy and Jenny are the loose focus of the movie.

Then, over two-thirds of the way through the movie, we jump forward in time. We thought Jenny and Andy might have escaped, but in the new post-apocalyptic world, they are both slaves in a new society. The new society is run by a psycho ex-professor who we briefly saw murder his daughter’s friends after his daughter was killed. It’s super random, and this late in the movie, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a whole new beginning to the story. I mean, there are less than 30 minutes left in the movie when the time jump happens. But hey, we finally get to see the Zombie Fight Club!

The fight club is a pit where the slaves of this new world are forced to fight for their lives against the undead. So, not so much a fight club, and more of a murder-for-entertainment situation. Think of The Governor from The Walking Dead and the zombie fights he put on. It’s similar to that, but with slaves instead of (mostly) volunteers. And really, the whole new world situation is a lot like The Governor’s city in The Walking Dead, just way over the top. And yeah, I’ve been referencing other things while describing Zombie Fight Club, but it really does seem like the movie isn’t trying to hide its inspirations. Many scenes felt like the filmmakers saw something in something else that was cool, so they decided they wanted it in their movie even if the plot got completely twisted out of shape to make the scene happen.

So anyway, in the final 30 minutes of the movie we follow Andy and Jenny as they try to escape to freedom which has been overrun with zombies anyway. The end.

This really felt like two movies mashed together, and it would have been better had this been two separate movies. But as it is, I still enjoyed Zombie Fight Club for how goofy it is. It doesn’t take itself seriously, so I shouldn’t take it seriously either. I’m sure I’ll watch it again sometime, because now that I know what to expect, I can enjoy it for what it is: dumb, fun, and bloody.

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Demons A Movie A Day Journal Entry (with introduction)

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An Introduction

I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to try to start blogging about all the movies I’m watching for my A Movie A Day challenge. Naturally I’ll need to keep them fairly brief since I’ll hopefully doing at least one every day, so I’m going to treat these more as personal journal entries rather than straight-up reviews. That means these will be completely subjective musings about my personal experiences while attempting to watch at least 366 movies in 2020. That will also allow me to blog about the same movie more than once without just posting the exact same thing when I inevitably watch the same movie over and over again. I might be watching the same movie, but the experience will always be unique. That’s good, because the very first experience I’ll be writing about involves a movie that I’ve seen bunches of times and will see bunches more!

Demons – A Movie A Day #77

March is my birth month, and even though my actual birthday is closer to the end of the month than the beginning, I wanted to start with a movie I knew I’d love. It was also the Sunday night before another long work week, and that was just one more reason to start it off right. For me, a good start will always involve Italian horror, the 80s, movies, demons, and lots of gore. Lamberto Bava’s Demons has all of those things in beautiful excess.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Demons, but the number is pretty high. There are definitely other movies I’ve seen more often (The Evil Dead, and The Crow being tops in my rewatch list), but I’ve seen Demons enough to know the music cues and sparse dialogue by heart. As many times as I’ve seen it, it never gets old.

The movie is about a group of people who get magically trapped inside a movie theater while watching a film about people getting infected with some sort of demonic curse that causes them to attack and infect everyone around them. With life imitating art, the people in the theater also get infected and attack each other, turning more and more of the theater-goers into grotesque monsters. It’s essentially The Evil Dead, only it’s in a movie theater rather than a cabin in the woods. Plus, with more characters than Sam Raimi’s masterpiece, the blood and gore flow more freely and frequently. Well, I suppose that’s an arguable point, but regardless, Demons is really, really bloody.

Another reason I wanted to watch Demons is because I’ve been thinking about covering some Italian horror movies for my podcast/web site The Last Theater. I’ve been trying to decide which movies I want to start with, and I’ve been circling around Demons and some other films that have strong connections to it. For one thing, the director, Lamberto Bava, is the son of great Italian director Mario Bava. Lamberto Bava worked as an assistant director on some of his father’s films, and he worked in the same role on a couple movies I’ve wanted to cover for a long time: Cannibal Holocaust and Tenebrae.

Also, there’s another great director I’ve been wanting to talk about on The Last Theater, and he’s actually an actor in Demons. Michele Soavi directed a trio of fantastic movies between 1987 and 1994, and I’ve been thinking of doing some sort of director’s spotlight on him. In Demons, Soavi plays a mysterious man wearing what looks like a chrome Phantom of the Opera mask. I actually just learned that recently, so I wanted to watch the movie again knowing that Soavi is in it.

There’s so much to love about Demons, and I love that I’m still learning more about after so many years of watching and rewatching it. I love it, and it was a great way to start the month.

 

 

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