Dir - Rob Jabbaz
Overall: MEH
The debut from writer/director Rob Jabbaz is the ruthlessly ridiculous and incredibly on the nose The Sadness, (Kū bēi), yet another movie that is desperately trying to squeeze some sort of individuality out of the criminally over saturated zombie outbreak market. Noticeably inspired by the comic book series Crossed, the differentiating quality here besides its blunt tie-ins to the COVID-19 pandemic and its politicized ripple effect is that the infected victims break out into depraved rages, maintaining their ability to speak and gleefully acting like all-around moral-lacking sociopaths. They bite and eat any and all body parts that they can get their hands on yes, but they also rape and torture with reckless abandon, even amongst themselves if they cannot find any innocent pedestrians to violate. All of this leads to unflinching amounts of gore, even if Jabbaz spares us extreme closeups of the rape at least. The tone quite frequently indulges in all out camp, but the entire presentation is so overblown anyway that throwing sentimentality to the side rather fits when oceans worth of bloodshed are fighting for screen time. The highly derivative nature makes it unmistakably redundant, but it is a knowingly nasty mess that will undoubtedly delight splatter hounds.
Dir - Julien Maury/Alexandre Bustillo
Overall: MEH
Overall: MEH
The latest from the French horror writer/director duo of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo The Deep House takes a somewhat ambitious and gimmicky approach to age old spooky cliches. A haunted house movie except underwater, it finds an excuse to use a contemporary found footage framework where the two leads are ghost hunting YouTubers. While logical then from a narrative standpoint, unfortunately this also provides an excuse for absolutely wretched dialog as James Jagger's obnoxious and unlikable character narrates to his audience in the most unnatural of ways when cartoonishly creepy things are happening all around him. Two thirds of the film take place in such an environment and sadly, this cornball approach makes it a serious offender of "dumb people in horror movies" nonsense that has long, long become hack. This is a shame since the basic premise is rather clever and Maury and Bustillo are adept enough as filmmakers in the genre to deliver a multitude of freaky set pieces. Nothing is underneath the surface though, at least nothing all that interesting, plus coupled with the tripe aspects, the movie kind of undermines itself.
Dir - Peter Thorwarth
Overall: GOOD
There is a hefty amount of ingenuity in Peter Thorwarth's Blood Red Sky, (Transatlantic 473); a high tension action movie that fuses enough wild ingredients together to make it pretty consistently gripping. Part airplane heist and part vampire film, the most impressive aspect is how Thorwarth and Stefan Holtz' script toys with familiar tropes. The two-hour running time only occasionally feels monotonous in its claustrophobic setting since so many fresh plot points keep popping up to wrack up the increasingly off the rails stakes. Movies that feature blood-sucking creatures of the night have been regularly pumped out since the silent days and it is nice to see a human element so prominently on display here. It often feels more like a zombie film, with this particular brand of vampirism coming off as more of a plague that spreads alarmingly fast, putting characters in fight or flight, (pardon the pun), scenarios as to how they manage it. While appropriately ramped up, the last act unfortunately indulges in too many loud, animalistic vampire squeals on the soundtrack and stretches plausibility to borderline schlock-level, but this is otherwise a fun ride that delivers on its ambitious premise.
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