Feast (2005)

Feast is the third movie produced from HBO and Bravo's first-time filmmaker series, Project Greenlight. The first two movies were ho-hum indie dramas that nobody ever saw. Feast is an indie horror that nobody but hardcore horror fans ever saw, but it is far from ho-hum.

The opening scene cleverly introduces the degenerate denizens of the dive bar that is basically the only location of the movie. Characters get title cards with a Name (like Bossman, Beer Guy, Honey Pie, and Hero), Occupation (where applicable), Fun Fact, and Life Expectancy. Just as the characters have all been accounted for, monsters burst in the window and turn the bar into an abattoir.

In minutes, the movie is total chaos. Blood and corrosive green bile and maggots are flying everywhere. The monsters are extremely hard to kill, exceptionally fast, very smart, possess razor-sharp teeth and talons, can reproduce in a matter of minutes, and seem to take sadistic pleasure in killing and defiling their prey.

The protagonists board up the windows, consolidate their limited weaponry, and try to find a way to communicate with somebody who can save them. They wire up explosives on a dead body to bait the monsters into getting blown up, they make a number of largely unsuccessful attempts at running to their vehicles, and they finally make a stand and battle it out. Needless to say, lots of people die.

Feast is cleverly written, with sharp dialogue and a winking knowledge of the horror genre. It's an old-fashioned monster movie, but amped up to 11 or 12. Most of the characters are assholes, but come off as likable all the same. The gore is impressive and the creature effects are very good, especially for such a low budget.

The cast is loaded with familiar faces: horror genre veterans, punk music legends, tv sitcom cast members, and "actor" Jason Mewes (Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob) as himself. This is a great way to add some Hollywood cachet to the movie without using up too much of the budget, especially since many of them are wiped out in the early going.  

Feast is nasty, offensive, ultra-violent, and just wrong on a million levels. If that's what you're looking for in a fast-paced, action-packed horror-comedy, Feast has you covered and then some.

Slaughterhouse (1987)

When a few friends out shooting an amateur horror movie split up for the night, two of them run through the woods, playfully chasing each other and winding up outside of the local run-down slaughterhouse. Before they can get their bearings, they are found by Buddy, a huge, filthy hillbilly with a giant long-handled meat-clever. He gleefully hacks them up with his clever, squealing and grunting like a pig the whole time.

We are then treated to a title sequence with goofy music played over stock footage of an actual slaughterhouse in action. Yuck.

Harold Murdock, owner and manager of the new, modern-style slaughterhouse has one thing standing in the way of success: Bacon and Son's Hog Slaughtering. The business is on the verge of bankruptcy and the county is going to take the property, but Lester Bacon still won't sell out to Harold's company.

Lester appreciates the good old days of craftsmanship in the meat business, and can't abide the impersonal, mechanized, modern version of the trade. Buddy, his son, appreciates a good waller in the pig pen, and is happy to kill anybody who messes with his hogs. And that means Murdock, the Sheriff, and everybody else involved in taking the Bacon's property. It also means the teenagers who came to the old slaughterhouse to shoot their video.

Slaughterhouse (a.k.a. Bacon Bits. Awesome.) is one that caught my eye a million times on VHS. That image of the hillbilly and his giant clever standing in a smoky doorway was nice and evocative, as was the wonderful tagline: "Buddy has an axe to grind. A BIG axe." And yet I never got around to renting it. Years later, I was thrilled to see it come to dvd (now out-of-print) and happily snatched up a copy. The movie lived up to my expectations as a slasher flick with a sense of humor.

Lester makes a delightfully exasperated but loving father for the deranged Buddy. It's kind of like the relationship between Jed Clampett and Jethro. He's patient and understanding, and always willing to make the best out of Buddy's mistakes. To make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you might say.

Buddy is kind of hilarious for an axe murderer. He carries a hog around as a pet, he eats dog food from a can, he squeezes into the dead deputy's shirt (fat guy in a little coat!) and joyrides in the police car to a shit-kicking country song, and he snorts and grunt and squeals everywhere he goes. To quote his daddy, Lester, "Buddy is a good boy, but he has what you might call a basic hygiene problem." Ha.

Animal lovers and vegetarians may find this movie unpleasant, revolving around the hog slaughtering business and all. But if that doesn't bother you too much, Slaughterhouse is a fun flick. It clearly doesn't take itself seriously, with all its puns and wacky characters, and yet it is at least as good a slasher movie as most that were churned out in the 80s. If you can track down a copy, it's well worth a watch. It would make a good double-feature with Motel Hell, too.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

In 1939, a worker at the slaughterhouse gives birth on the job and dies. Her boy is collected up by the Hewitt family and raised as their own. They named him Thomas, but he is better known as Leatherface.

Thomas has a skin condition that causes facial deformities. But as his uncle Charlie says, you don't have to look pretty to work down at the slaughterhouse. Of course, skin disease is the least of Thomas' issues, as he is violently insane.

Fast forward thirty years to 1969. The slaughterhouse has been condemned by the Texas Board of Health and Thomas no longer has an outlet for his murderous impulses. And that's bad news for folks passing through this part of Texas.

Which brings us to brothers Dean and Eric Hill, and their girlfriends, Chrissie and Bailey. They are on their way to California to send Dean back to Vietnam along with his newly drafted brother. Only Eric has decided to burn his draft card and run away to Mexico, which infuriates Dean.

None of this matters a lot, though, as they have a car wreck and are found by Sheriff Hoyt - who is actually Thomas' uncle Charlie, and the head of the murderous, cannibalistic Hewitt family. Carnage ensues.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is, of course, a prequel to the 2003 remake of the 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Unlike the original movie, which isn't nearly as graphic as its reputation, or the 2003 movie, which was gruesome but maintained a fast-paced slasher aesthetic, this movie is pretty rough. The influences of the torture porn sub-genre are apparent this time around, but it thankfully doesn't go whole hog into that territory.

R. Lee Ermey is again the star of the show, even moreso than in the 2003 movie. He gets all the great dialogue, recalling his famous role as the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. He exudes a sadistic menace like no other actor, knowing how to deliver a line in just the right way to make it both comical and cruel at the same time.

And then there's Leatherface. As with the 2003 film, Leatherface is a huge man. He fills the screen with his presence - a mountain of a man that you can't possibly hope to make your way around to escape. And when he fires up that chainsaw and that sound is all you can hear, the effect is very intimidating.

When I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning at the theater, I told myself I would never watch that movie again. Well, this is the second time I've watched it since I said that and I have enjoyed the movie more each time. The violent scenes, particularly when Thomas takes his first new face, are still cringe-worthy, but they're not as awful as all that.

Any unpleasantness from those violent scenes is more than made up for by the wonderful, darkly humorous performance by R. Lee Ermey and the rest of the bat-shit crazy Hewitt family. This isn't the best movie in the series - whatever the era - but it is entertaining and fits right in with the lunacy found in every installment.

The Eye (2002)

Twenty-year-old Mun has been blind since she was two years old, and is finally able to see again thanks to a corneal transplant. The return of her sense of sight takes getting used to, as she has to learn to recognize visually things she has known only in darkness, including her own face in the mirror.

This process is greatly complicated by Mun seeing people who shouldn't be there - a shadowy visitor to the old woman who shares her hospital room in the middle of the night, a man standing in the middle of the freeway, and so on.

As Mun's sight and understanding improve, the strange images persist - a sad little boy in the hallway, a mother and child, a little boy who was just hit by a car. And she sees more of the shadowy figure who came to the old woman at the hospital just before she died.

These spectres seem to want to communicate with Mun, drawing close to her like a moth to a flame. Mun realizes that the ghosts must need something from her, and that they will never leave her alone. She must track down the donor who gave her her new corneas in the hope that she can find out why she can see the dead, and how she can make it stop.

The Eye is one of the better entries in the Asian horror explosion of the early 2000s. Directors The Pang Brothers' use of surround sound and unsettling imagery are the highlight here. It's best experienced with the lights out and the sound system cranked up. If you can get past the subtitles and get into the film, The Eye is a scary one.

Wrestlemaniac (2006)

How many horror movies begin with a group of friends in a van on their way to do something illicit? Well, add Wrestlemaniac to that tally.

So yeah, these six companions are headed through Mexico in a van on their way to make a movie, of sorts. If you know what I mean. They get lost along the way and wind up in La Sangre de Dios, an infamous ghost town where legendary luchador El Mascarado was sent after he killed some opponents in the ring.

The story goes that El Mascarado was created from body parts of Mexico's best wrestlers so he could win Olympic gold for Mexico... or something. The backstory is a little fuzzy. After his disastrous career in the ring, the government took him to La Sangre de Dios to "fix" him via multiple lobotomies.

It didn't work. 

And so the amateur filmmakers, such as they are, run afoul of the legendary masked maniac and are slaughtered one by one by his killer moves. In keeping with the traditions of Mexican wrestling, when El Mascarado wins a fight he unmasks his opponent - even if they aren't wearing a mask. Yowch.

By the rules of Mexican wrestling, once a wrestler's mask is removed and his face is revealed to the public, he must retire in disgrace. Can our protagonists take off El Mascarado's mask before he takes off theirs? Or will their faces all end up pinned to his trophy wall?

Wrestlemaniac (which has to be one of the greatest titles in horror history) clocks in at a brisk 75 minutes. It's barely a feature-length film, and yet it still feels like it should have been trimmed of about 10-15 minutes of padding in the beginning.

Still, once El Mascarado shows up and starts slamming bodies and peeling faces, the movie really picks up steam. Despite loathing most of the characters, I found myself getting into the slasher/wrestling action. There's even a sense of humor behind the horror at times, and I'm not talking about the terribly written and acted early scenes that utterly fail at being funny. Once the carnage begins it's entertaining, and that's all you need to see.

Really, fast forward until you see the drunk girl wander out away from town and just watch from there. You know you're at the right part by the bug you can see crawling across the camera lens. Olé!

Maniac (2012)

Frank Zito (Elijah Wood) is a terribly insane man whose delusions about his mother compel him to murder and scalp the women he desires. He brings the scalps home and staples them to his collection of mannequins, creating a sort of harem of "girlfriends."

Frank meets Anna, a beautiful French artist who is working on a project involving photos of mannequins. When she sees the restored vintage mannequins Frank has in the store he lives behind, she asks to borrow them for an installation of her art. With some trepidation, he agrees, and provides her with a van full of mannequins without faces, just as she requested.

At her show, she projects images of her own face on the blank mannequin heads, and you know that's going to mess with Frank's head. And Frank's head is already messed up enough, thank you very much.

The remake of William Lustig's 1980 slasher classic was written and produced by Alexander Aja, whom horror fans will know from Haute Tension and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Aja and director Franck Khalfoun have taken the bold, unusual step of presenting the majority of Maniac in the first person perspective. This puts us very uncomfortably inside the mind and behind the eyes of the killer. We follow his gaze as he assesses, stalks, and kills his targets, only occasionally glimpsing Frank in a reflection.

When we do see him, Elijah Wood makes the perfect non-threatening killer. He looks the part of an artist. More than that, he looks like a child wearing a penciled-in beard. He has sweet, soulful eyes when he is hopeful about a normal life with Anna, but they turn cold and haunting when his delusions overtake him. The effect is absolutely chilling.

The movie features a pulsing, synth-heavy original soundtrack and an evocative selection of songs from Ave Maria to "Goodbye Horses" (a wonderfully creepy 80s track you may remember from The Silence of the Lambs). It all sets a darkly energetic mood that utterly encapsulates Frank and his twisted compulsions.

Visceral, unsettling, gory, and cringe-inducing - this is the scariest slasher movie I've ever seen. I was biting my knuckles for the whole last twenty minutes. Horror veterans who want a new take on the sub-genre shouldn't miss Maniac. It's the best slasher movie in years.

And holy crap, there's a reflection shot of Frank standing up after a kill that looks exactly like the infamous poster of the original movie. Bravo, Maniac. Amazing.

Saw 3D (2010)

After a gruesome radial saw trap pitting two young men against the woman who was playing them both for suckers, Saw 3D gets off and running with the story of Bobby Dagen, Jigsaw survivor. With a self-help book, talk show appearances, and an upcoming dvd, Bobby is profiting off of his harrowing story of survival, in which he was forced to hoist himself up from a deathtrap using chains attached to hooks pierced into his pectoral muscles. Ouch.

Bobby leads a Jigsaw Survivors' Group, which counts Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, in his first appearance since the first movie) among its members. Bobby tries to convince the survivors to take pride and value in their survival experiences, in much the same way that Jigsaw intended. Some of the survivors feel the same way, but, understandably, not all. 

Naturally, Jigsaw and his disciples don't appreciate Bobby using this story for his personal gain. Next thing Bobby knows, he has been abducted and placed into a complex, multi-faceted trap with several lives on the line. There's a "speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil" theme for most of it, with consequences for success that are nearly as horrible as the consequences for failure. And at the end of the ordeal, Bobby must face a version of the trap that made him famous with his wife's life at stake.

In the meantime, Jigsaw's ex-wife, Jill Tuck, informs members of the police's Internal Affairs department that Detective Mark Hoffman is Jigsaw's accomplice and protege. Their part of the story has them investigating a grizzly multiple-murder scene for evidence that will put Hoffman away and hopefully end Jigsaw's reign of terror. It's all a cat-and-mouse game between Hoffman and Jill that brings to mind the tagline of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre - "who will survive, and what will be left of them?"

Like Saw VI with its hammering of predatory lenders and evil insurance company executives, Saw 3D goes for a bit of a "ripped from today's headlines" thing as well. This time, you can draw a parallel between Bobby and James Frey, disgraced author of the fabricated memoir A Million Little Pieces. Of course, Bobby only had to face a series of painful, murderous traps to attone for his falsehoods. Frey had to face Oprah on national television. Now that's torture.

For most people, particularly those who haven't watched these movies, the Saw series is all about the deaths. What gory, nasty ways can the filmmakers devise to make people torture themselves to death  this time? This being the final installment in the series, they don't skimp on the traps, in number if not always in ingenuity. There are more than enough Rube Goldberg death machines in Saw 3D to satisfy your basest desires for bloody carnage. Strangely, some are even kindof funny in a Hatchet or Dead Alive sort of way. Some are extremely complex, some are diabolically simple, and there is even old favorite that is given a fantastic curtain call as the series comes to a close. 

But more than the traps and the gore, for fans who have followed the series in every installment, the Saw movies are about the twists and turns of the story. It is convoluted and interwoven and maintains continuity far beyond the usual requirements of a horror franchise. And with Saw 3D, most, if not all, of the loose ends are tied up in a nice, bloody bow. 

There is still an opening for a return to the series, naturally, but so far it looks like Saw is over and done. If it does all end here, the wrap-up is satisfying for those of us who stuck by the movies through thick and thin. They threw a ton of traps on the screen and a load of blood and guts at the camera (in 3D!!), and generally went out with a bang. That's a lot more than we can say for the majority of horror franchises.