Yellow Brick Road

If every time a group of people take a specific path of travelling they end up dead, how can other people take this path to find out that the first group of people have been killed?  Wouldn't the second set of people discovering the first dead group get killed themselves? I can usually ignore some of the illogical liberties that supernatural films take, however in Yellow Brick Road, these poorly thought out concepts keep coming up.

                Team of experts (experts is used very lightly) get together to trek down an infamous outdoor trail where people end up getting killed. For starters, there is no actual trail that these people follow, mainly open fields and with no distinguishing terrain. This group takes a hiking trip over this dull scenery and the further they go, although where they are going doesn`t make too much sense to begin with, music from the past starts to fill the air. The music shuts off and turns back on randomly and this starts to get to the travelers psyche and just as I was already hating this film, they start to kill each other off with terrible make up effects. 

                 The question that I couldn`t get out of my mind was if this trail leads to something to be discovered, why don`t they just fly over the area? The characters keep saying that they have walked forever, but it never appears that they have walked for very long at all. Usually after someone has walked for several days straight, they will appear exhausted or even dirty. At no point did I feel that these people have suffered enough to start acting psychotic or even having visions. 

This film is just plain ridiculous.

Avoid it.

They Came Back (2004 France) AKA Les Revenants

I may have a halo effect when it comes to French cinema because I am of French descent. However, it is hard not to enjoy movies in which there has been effort made to create something new and thoroughly thought out. People had warned me that they thought I would find it boring and oh contraire mes ami, I found it quite fascinating.

                What if 2300 people who had died within the last 10 years just suddenly came back, appearing physically unchanged from death? The horror in the film is more disturbing and believable because of the realistic sense of having to deal with the situation politically as well as emotionally. Those that come back have colder body temperatures, they are slower moving, slower reacting, and appear to be only capable of thought processes that they can retrieve from their past memories. They cannot sleep and most of them slip out of their houses and join together for meetings with other undead folk. 

                The creepiness factor is really high being that no true answers are given right off the start, leaving the main characters as well as the audience continuously guessing. Slowness of the film is a marvellous technique that adds so much to the eerie and often melancholy feel. This reaches emotional levels that most films would try and dodge, hoping to attract more audiences.   

                If you still have the patience of a 5 year old, then you may just want to skip this one. But if you enjoy having your thoughts challenged, then this one is for you.

See it

Bereavement (2010)

Ok let's get something straight. A girl who has lost her parents because of an accident, is not a character, that is a thing that happens to a character. A girl who is new to a small town high school, is not a character. A boy who looks after his paralyzed father, who happens to be a jerk father, is not a character.  These are things that characters have to deal with, not who they are. Just because you give an actor a name and clothe to wear and tell them "Ok now this happens to you... now act." does make them characters. I have seen finger puppets deliver more believable personalities than the paint by number bores this film has.

                "Bereavement" is another exceptionally dull horror film that does not offer anything new to the genre of serial killers/torture films. In this one, a young boy who lacks the ability to physically feel anything, gets abducted from a  swing by a madman who raises him in an abandoned meat factory, where he is forced to watch the madman chop up kidnapped women to please a cow skull that instructs the man to perform the tortures. After that you have seen it all. This is boring and poorly paced. Much of the time, even when it's suppose to be scary, I found myself uninterested and counting the minutes going by.

                It is said that this movie barely received an "R" rating but after much work it was given the "R" rating and had minimum theatrical release. This shocked me to hear, mainly because the film is not that violent or ore as others in the genre, for instance any of the "Saw" films. These types of claims usually pop up for movies that are not that good to begin with. It is a marketing strategy to have viewers believe that what they are about to watch is going to be something that will be over the top or even shocking. This is why almost all horror films get released on Bluray/DVD as "unrated". In the past being unrated meant that the movie was not interesting enough to even waste the time of the films boards that rate them. Don't be fooled when this one comes out.

Don't Let Him In (2011)

It doesn’t matter if it is in the movies or real life, watching stupid people make stupid decisions is downright annoying.  Without revealing any spoilers, let me explain a couple of situations that caused me to emotionally disconnect from the events of this mundane monstrosity.

                A couple of couples head out to a cabin in the middle of a forest (cliché) before reaching their death trap destination they run into a police officer who warns them about a serial killer who is still on the loose and may be in the vicinity of cabin. They still head out there but not before almost hitting a hitch hiker (cliché) and later run into a mysterious stranger (cliché). When the hitchhiker comes falling into their cabin, bloodied up from a huge cut on his side, they patch him up and become friends with him. Whether they can trust this hitchhiker or even themselves, he is still a cut up man that was attacked in the woods that is suppose to have a insane serial killer and these people still stay on their vacation type of trip. Two guys even go fishing the next day. These people are so stupid that I thought they were not being knocked off by the serial killer fast enough.

                This is a short flick, only running 80 minutes long and I still found myself looking at the clock. Not worth the time.

Avoid it