Review: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever

IMDB rate: 4,2

Genre: Virus

I finally was able to watch Cabin Fever 2, I was a bit curious about it because the first one was funny in a very weird and bad way. I always like to watch virus movies, especially when it's in a setup like this one where it's continues where the previous part ended. It's kinda like REC, but well, obviously only the continuation part. 

Cabin Fever 2 isn't much of a good movie, it's a lot like the first one but a lot more random and with a bigger setup.

A High School prom faces a deadly threat: a flesh-eating virus that spreads via a popular brand of bottled water.

It was kinda funny, the movie starts with Rider Strong, the same actor as the first movie ends with, and he is listed at the top everywhere, but he's only in the movie for about.. 3 minutes or so? I would have liked to see his part a little bit bigger, perhaps him finding some sort of cure or explaining some stuff, but well, it kinda ended very fast.

The movie is still a bit comedic-like, just like the first one. While the first one had some disgusting skin parts, I think that the sequel was even more disgusting. It really made me a tiny bit sick in my stomach a few times, quite funny really since it's a ridiculous movie.

As expected, Cabin Fever 2 was filled with sex again. But in this one, it was more in a nasty level. Blow-jobs with nasty lips, pus from penises, tits with nasty humps, miscarriages, it was like they tried to shock everyone even more. I don't mind though, while it made me sick looking at it, it was also kinda a cool twist to actually show these nastinesses. 

The movie itself, it wasn't too great. It seemed kinda random to me. We know who is sick and we know what will happen to those who touch the water, so what will happen to most of them is not very surprising anymore. The main story in this one seems to be a guy who likes a girl and they both tried to escape this virus, again, not a very original concept. Well, then the school is being put into quarantine, which makes it harder for them to escape. So the biggest deal from this movie is waiting for them to escape, there's not a whole lot tension in that to be honest.

I think that Spring Fever is a decent sequel for Cabin Fever, considering all these terrible other sequels in the world, it's really not that bad. The acting is definitely not very good and the storyline neither, but the gore is awesome and so are the special effects. This is one of the few movies that actually made me a tiny bit sick, so thumbs up for that! Overall, the movie isn't too good, but it gets a few points for being disgusting.

My personal rate: 4/10

Review: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead

IMDB rate: 8,0

Genre: Zombie

Finally, a review about the original Dawn of the Dead!
Now, I saw this movie only once before and well before you judge me for my opinion I want you to know this; I liked this movie, it was fun for the time it was made. But, I do think that the remake is almost as good as this one. I know that it's not very popular to say that you liked a remake almost as much as the original, but in some cases it's just how it is. Now I think that I have this opinion quite often, but this is mostly because in almost all cases I saw the remake before the original. Bear in mind that I'm only 20 years old and I just grew up with the remakes and not with any original movies. For me the original movies are old and look kinda funny, I don't know any better, because I grew up with more 'quality movies'. Now I'm not trying to say that I dislike every original movie, most of them are excellent and they are of course the basic of every remake. I just wanted to explain the reason why I sometimes actually like the remake a bit more.

This sequel of "Night of the Living Dead" is filled with splattered blood and brains in living color. The dead have come back to life to eat the living. This is the story of the escape of four people from an urban nightmare to a suburban nightmare. They barricade themselves in a shopping mall and try to start new lives.

The biggest difference with the remake and the original ones are of course the zombies: In the original they were grey and because of the filter they often looked blue. Their skin isn't all disgusting, in fact it's very smooth and grey and there isn't a lot of blood on their skin. In the remake the skin is all messed up and filled with blood, infections and nastiness. But the biggest difference of them all is of course that they were walkers in the 1978 one, and they were runners in the remake. Now for a Romero remake this is quite a big difference, since he became best known with his 'walkers'.

I liked them both to be honest, comparing the walkers and the runners. The walkers gives the people more opportunity to escape, while the runners.. well, they are quite difficult to escape.
The walkers has a bit more mystery over them, it's kinda cute how slow they are. With runners you're kinda fucked anyway.
Comparing the looks I like the new ones best, they look scarier and the illness of them seems a lot more threatening. It makes them look more dangerous and with that more aggressive.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) has a lot more character development compared to the remake. To me this wasn't something very interesting, since I care more about the zombies. It never really felt as if these people were in danger, which is kinda sad really since that's the most fun thing about these movies.

What I liked most about the movie is that the people escaped to a shopping mall, a shopping mall is big and has a lot of things that these people might need. It was also good that they made a fake wall to protect themselves from other people. I disliked the part where they started shooting the motorcyclists, they endangered themselves quite a bit, which isn't very smart in any way. If they wouldn't have started shooting, perhaps the bikers would have driven away.

It's also very awesome to see that they really settled in this mall-attic thingy, it's really shows how long they are already stuck in there which makes you admire them. It's very awesome to see that they survived for that long already, in good health. The characters are very easily likable, they are charming, funny and dependable. You start caring for these characters and it's devastating if something happens to one of them. While I don't care a whole lot about their character development, it's done in a right way.

A good message from this movie shows when the bikers starts threatening them, it's funny because all this time they were hiding from zombies, almost forgetting that there are other humans alive as well. It's weird to see that these humans are a bigger threat to them compared with the zombies. Humans can think straight, they are able to use guns and drive vehicles, which makes them more faster and a lot more dangerous than zombies.

I liked Dawn of the Dead, it's an excellent movie with a strong message. I would have liked it better though if there was a bit more focus on the zombies, rather than the characters. The characters didn't really seem endangered because of them, which is something I would have liked to see. I liked the remake as well, I will write a review about it soon. In some sort of way I'm not sure if it's fair to compare these two movies. They both carry the same name, which makes it kinda obvious to compare them, but thinking about it, they are very different. The only thing that matches are the threat of zombies and the shopping mall, while all the other things are not very much alike. Even the zombies differ a lot.
The only thing that I hated was the fact that it seemed to carry on for far too long, I couldn't help myself wondering when it would finally end.
It's a good movie, but while writing this review I tended to forget that it was made quite some time ago already.

My personal rate: 7,5/10

Review: Masters of Horror: Haeckel's Tale (2006)

Haeckel's Tale

Masters of Horror

IMDB rate: 6,1

Genre: Zombie

Time to continue my Masters of Horror reviews again! It has been quite some time already, because I think it's unhealthy to watch all these ones in a row... they are very weird most of the time.
No, but in all seriousness, these are definitely movies that you need to be in a mood for, since they aren't too good most of the time, and they are often very strange.
Haeckel's Tale is the eleventh episode of the first Masters of Horror season, as I've explained before, my DVD's are in a different order than the episodes, so in total I still need to watch 4 movies I believe.

In the nineteenth century, a man seeks help with a necromancer, asking her to revive his beloved wife. The woman advises him that the process could be dangerous, since she can bring the body back, but not necessarily the spirit and proposes him to listen to Haeckel's story to help in his decision. Ernst Haeckel is a cocky medical student fascinated with resuscitation. When the illness of his father becomes terminal, he travels to visit him and in his journey he meets the necromancer Montesquino, who claims to have the ability to bring back the dead to life. While preparing to spend the night nearby a cemetery, the old man Wolfram offers him shelter in his home, telling him that it would be very dangerous to stay near the necropolis. Haeckel accepts the invitation and meets his young wife Elise Wolfram. He feels seduced by the sexy woman,  and sooner he finds her eternal love for her deceased husband.

Haeckel's Tale is not very much a predictable movie. The movies only one hour long but I can't say that I wasn't surprised by any of it. Surprised I was, and with that I was also a bit disgusted. It was a strange movie but it was also impressive because it crossed the moral line a few times.

Beware, there are some spoilers ahead. I normally would try to avoid spoilers, but it's very hard with this movie. Elise is the beautiful young wife of the old not very attractive Wolfram, everyone seeing this knows that something isn't right since it isn't a very usual combination. You suspect that Wolfram is some sort of woman abuser since he is commanding his wife quite a lot and isn't very nice to her. And this is where we were wrong. You see, this eternal love of her deceased husband isn't very standard with her, her love is that messed up that she brings her husband back from the dead, only to have sex with him. And her living husband knows of this, so actually you're feeling kinda sorry for him. Now, seeing that this woman is having sex with a zombie is already a bit messed up, but when you notice that there are many other zombies watching them and touching the woman too, it becomes... too much.
It's very disgusting that this woman has an obsession with having sex with dead people, but of course, this is what the story's all about so we'll have to deal with that.

The acting is quite decent. In some cases it's a bit over-acted but it's not too obvious or annoying. The special effects are, simply said, awful. We see this resurrected zombie dog and well, it's just plain awful how fake it looked. That being said, the half zombie baby wasn't very scary either.

The Masters of Horror movies aren't the most excellent movies ever made, most of them are very boring. Haeckel's Tale was not my favorite one, but it wasn't too bad either. It was quite disgusting, even though the special effects looked awesome. I think it's quite an achievement to make a movie disgusting with horrible special effects, so for that, thumbs up!

My personal rate: 6/10

The Walking Dead season 4.2 trailer!

First Game of Thrones season 4 trailer is out - and it looks awesome.

It feels as if I'm already waiting ages for this, but now finally we have a date we can watch out to again: April 6!

I CAN'T WAIT!!

Review: Misery (1990)

Misery

IMDB rate: 7,8

Genre: Thriller

This was actually the first time that I ever saw Misery. I own the movie for a long time already, but I never got around watching it. Also, I never read the book strangely enough. I own tons of Stephen King books, but for some reason I was never interested by reading Misery. I’ve seen the movie now and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, so I’m very curious about reading the book now. It’s always fun to compare the books and the movies, to see the differences between them. For example, The Shining book is very different from the movie. They are both excellent, but again, very different.

Best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon is on his way home from his Colorado hideaway after completing his latest book, when he crashes his car in a freak blizzard. Paul is critically injured, but is rescued by former nurse Annie Wilkes, Paul's "number one fan", who takes Paul back to her remote house in the mountains (without bothering to tell anybody). Unfortunately for Paul, Annie is also a headcase. When she discovers that Paul has killed off the heroine in her favorite novels, her reaction leaves Paul shattered...

Misery isn’t a real horror movie in my opinion, it is very tensive I’ll admit, but I didn’t find anything scary about it. Well, one scene was a bit sick, I'll admit but it wasn't really scary. The movie itself isn’t very surprising, it’s quite predictable but that didn’t made it a bad movie. Even though it was a bit predictable, it didn’t made it any less tensive. I knew what was going to happen, but jesus, I was still scared that the man would get caught by this lunatic woman. To me that was what made it such a great movie. It isn’t easy to make a movie like this, we all know what will happen so it’s kinda hard to still make it special. I must say, Rob Reiner did an excellent job with Misery.

Now, what really made this movie as good as it is, is of course Kathy Bates. She actually won an Oscar for her role in Misery and with that it was the first or one of the first horror movies that actually received an Oscar. I’ve seen Kathy Bates in plenty movies where she mostly plays a nice lady, but seeing Kathy Bates in a role like this one was very unreal to me, because I’m not used to seeing her like that, but boy, she did an amazing job playing a lunatic woman.

I always find it very interesting how movies can be made tensive, even though it's mostly only playing in one single room. Because there aren't scares like monsters or anything it's up to Kathy Bates' character to be the scariest thing in that room, and believe me, she was. One of the scariest villains I've ever seen, and not one that can be compared with Freddy Krueger or anything like that, she's the realest one out there. 

 I liked Misery a lot. It's a solid movie even though the concept is quite simple. What made this movie as good as it was is mainly the performance of Kathy Bates, who actually won an Oscar for her role in Misery. Not all credit goes to Kathy Bates, because James Caan's performance is just as good. Misery is a very interesting movie that's tensive until the very last moment.

My personal rate: 8,5/10