Wes Craven Presents: They (2002) – Gee, Craven lending his name (and no other input) to a horror movie about bad dreams? Boy, what are the odds?
In this case, the bad dreams are actually “night terrors” (they’re a distinct thing, look it up), which psychology student Julia had in her childhood, along with some other friends and acquaintances. But now one of those friends is convinced that whatever “they” are which gave them the bad dreams in the first place, they’re back to claim what they marked before. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that friend doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first place — his mental breakdown takes the form of a bullet through his brain in front of Julia in a crowded diner.
But even worse, Julia and the rest of the “night terror veteran” crew start seeing things from the corners of their eyes, things that dwell in shadows, things that MAKE shadows…
No new ground is broken here, but it’s a competent little scary-flick. The CGI creatures are thankfully kept to the shadows, as the premise demands. And one artist character lives in an open brick loft in an industrial district — if I were a single guy and could choose where I lived…
Conan the Barbarian (2011) – Maybe, just maybe, we could someday have a Conan movie made by someone who understands the character. He’s not a tortured young man dedicating his life to revenge against the warlord who killed his father (Ron Perlman, the only red-headed Cimmerian ever); he should not be Inigo Montoya with more muscles. (He also shouldn’t be someone raised in slavery from childhood to become a gladiator.)
At his core, Conan is an unsoftened barbarian: an intelligent but uncivilized man, raised in savage circumstances, who exploits the pleasures of the civilized world for the fun of it but who never respects civilization, or even fully understands it. His is a primal personality, with very little space between thought and action, and while cunning and clever, he has no patience with the cumbersome rules of tame society. He wanders the nations of the Hyborian Age not on a soul-deep quest for vengeance, but for curiosity and plunder in equal parts. And his narration should NOT be given by Morgan Freeman.
Of course, for all I know, this movie DID start out like that, until execs got involved and said, “No, no, he needs a more emotional character arc,” “No, what he’s fighting against needs to be apocalyptic in scope…” At least it’s better than the Solomon Kane movie of a decade ago, which did even more damage to the character by forcing in the cookie-cutter emotional arc. (And Solomon Kane was itself better than Kull the Conqueror (1997), of which the less said, the better.)
Horror Rises From the Tomb (1973) – Paul Naschy stars as a Renaissance warlock who, with his consort, was executed for Satanism; he’s also a lookalike modern descendant of the warlock’s brother who betrayed him, and who still owns the land that this all took place on. His best friend is likewise the direct lookalike descendant of the other man who condemned the warlock to beheading. For kicks and giggles, and to prove a medium wrong, they and their girlfriends take a vacation on the old family land to look for the warlock’s head, hidden and buried apart from the body. Unfortunately, they find it.
What then follows is a parade of both men and women being either possessed or murdered by the warlock and his consort — the main difference being that the women end up stripping off their tops first. After a certain point, you stop even trying to figure out who the new characters are, because they ain’t gonna be around long.
And the last half hour is a tedious slog, because by that time we”re left with only a couple of secondary characters alive and we’ve got to fill out the running time to feature length. So they have to slow-walk every plot point.
So… Yeah. It would make a pretty good edited-down half-hour featurette.
Abandoned movies: Final Approach.