(2002)
Dir - Neil Marshall
Overall: MEH
Neil Marshall's full-length debut Dog Soldiers is basically Predator and Night of the Living Dead thrown into a blender, except sillier and more gory than either. Oh, and also with werewolves. Marshall is not so much interested in creating a slow-boil level of dread and then unleashing it in an aggressively terrifying manner here as he did superbly with his follow up The Descent. Instead, this is overtly comedic and over the top, with British, military badasses screaming and swearing some pretty funny dialog at each other while shooting off gallons of ammo. There is also plenty of absolutely ridiculous set pieces, (a human and a werewolf engaging in a fist fight anyone?), all sorts of things getting blown up, and even some organs literally pouring out of a man's stomach. Davos Seaworth is an asshole in it as well. Good times! All that said, it is overall less engaging than it sounds and more a combination of action movie hijinks dialed to eleven than a consistently solid movie. It is worth a chuckle or two though.
(2008)
Dir - Olly Blackburn
Overall: MEH
The somewhat ambitious Donkey Punch from Olly Blackburn, (who also made the unbelievably awful Kristy as his second and to date last full-length), ultimately bites off more than it can chew. Large parts of the film are grounded in reality; the violence is awkward and messy and exclusively brought on by extreme acts of panic and desperation. As things go on though, the script has an impossible task of making the rash choices that its characters engage in seem plausible. Too many moments dip their toes into schlock while trying to simultaneously ground them in reality. Characters at one moment seem believably remorseful only to switch to almost cartoon-villain levels of scumbaggery. Once it becomes clear that everyone will be doomed and that the "final girl" has been established from the opening scene, it falls into the trap of conventional slasher movies where it is just a boring waiting game for increasingly awful people to get picked off. Even though Blackburn tries a different approach here, it does not avoid enough genre pratfalls to work as well as intended.
(2009)
Dir - John Harrison
Overall: MEH
This rather loose adaptation of the linking segment to Clive Barker's "The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street (A Postscript)" from his Books of Blood collection has an acceptable amount of gore and eroticism, but does not offer much else. John Harrison's first non-television full-length since 1990's Tales from the Darkside, it is remarkably low on schlock and plays its hand rather seriously. While this keeps the tone tightly consistent, the screenplay by Harrison and Darin Silverman does not offer much beyond typical horror movie tropes and sub-par dialog. The diluted color pallet, generic Spirit Halloween looking ghosts, poor CGI, stock score, and stock sound effects keep it grimy and gloomy, but everything that happens plot wise is also a predictable mishmash of supernatural ghost hunter cliches. It is worse though that the characters never become properly fleshed-out even as we spend a great deal of time trying to get to know them. The film just continues to escalate to a skin-crawling, (and removing), finish line while falling pretty flat in the process. It is nowhere near the worst bit of celluloid to be based on Barker's works, but it is also nowhere near the best.
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