Danny Price’s Top 5/5 Best And Motherfucking Worst Picks For 2008

Well kiddos 2008 is about to go flying out the window and what a year it’s been, a majority shitty one that is! Let’s face it 08′ hasn’t been all that positive on the horror aspect of cinema, why is it that anything of value had to have been sort out? *cough* Repo! *cough*, I mean we’ve been bombarded with such crap fests as Mirrors, The Happening, and Mother of Tears, not to mention the usual serving of vomit inducing remakes; Prom Night, One Missed Call, Day of the Dead, but all was not lost because we were indeed blessed with a slew of such awesomely kickass flicks as; [REC*], Let the Right One In, and Inside (A L’interieur).

So here it is, the 5 absolute best and rock bottom worst flicks of 2008 as picked by moi, sit back and enjoy my opinions dammit! - Danny Price

THE HITS

1. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN - What the hell is this!? A vampire movie that isn’t Twilight? Shock horror! In an age of sparkling vampires and anti-climactic happenings it’s nice to see that originality and genius still exist out there…it may be hidden deep in the heart of Sweden but hey it’s better than locked up in “Michael Bays Chest of Love and JoyTM”, a place where originality hasn’t shone in many a century.

This is a movie quite literally made of pure gold (not an actual guarantee), Let the Right One In hit’s the mark in every conceivable way, the emotional aspect not least of all. Thomas Alfredson has created a finely crafted relationship between the two main characters that it puts all other vampire relationship movies (ah, I wonder which one I’m talking about here) to shame. This boys and ghouls is the best flick of 2008, guaran-damn-teed (and that is an actual one).

2. THE MIST - Stephen King movies, as a rule, suck until proven otherwise! I’m a massive King fan but let’s face it, the chances that an adaptation of the mans work will be anything more than mediocre are rather low, The Mangler isn’t about to win any awards and Thinner even less so. But wait, what’s that? Is it…could it be…an exception? Why yes it is! And what be thy name? Why if it ain’t god old Saint Darabont. I am convince that the man can do no wrong when handling Kings material, not that I wasn’t convinced at The Shawshank Redemption, but more so now then ever before because few movies can evoke strong emotions from me, fewer can leave me speechless, The Mist did all that and so much more. The Mist is not a monster movie in the conventional sense, it’s a pressure cooker character study on our inability to co-exist when the shit hits the fan. This movie divides people, there’s no skirting around that fact, it’s one of those rare movies that by the end will have people with conflicting opinions at each others throats in debate. There is only one way to describe this movie…perfect.

3. BUG - Okay so maybe it was released a whole 2 years ago for most who’ll be reading this but dammit it’s only just hit the Australian shores. Bug is the very definition of a bat shit crazy, mess you up, mind fuck movie, a genre of which I am rather fond of, sadly the mostly likely place to find it is at the very bottom of the bargain bin for $9.95 (if you ever see such a sight buy it immediately or be forever damned), it’s just one of ‘those’ movies like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon or Spiral that will never be appreciated or embraced by the mainstream, but who gives a fuck about them right? It doesn’t help that it was so poorly advertised, if you didn’t do some research on it you’d think it was a monster movie! Just look at the fucking poster. So what makes Bug so spectacular? What the fuck doesn’t make it so spectacular!? The acting alone makes Bug a must see, just to be witness to some of the most bat shit crazy acting you will ever see, I kid you not it’s as if Freidkin had picked two people he’d met in an insane asylum and tossed them on screen (and god bless the bastard). Bug is one of those movies, you know the ones, the ones you need to fucking see!

4. REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA - Well it’s about fucking time! As we all know by now Repo! has become this years Grindhouse, but I did get to see it, and thank fuck I did because I love Repo! I really, really do. Having seen it I now know exactly why Repo! got the shaft by the general public, for the same reason Sweeney Todd got raped in the box office, it’s why nobody got to see Grindhouse, not to mention why I will be 50 before I get to see Paranormal Activity (I will not die happy until I see that one).

I really hate to echo every internet troll out there but fuck it the general public just wouldn’t ‘get it’ dammit. Whilst there is some discrepancies where the music was concerned (the majority of which I loved mind you) it’s the entire glorious look of the film that got me, Repo! The Genetic Opera looks fuckable! It’s a visual orgasm on par with Sin City. If I were wearing a hat I’d take it off to Darren Lynn Bousman for proving that he’s more than a Saw-hit-wonder.

5. DR. INFERNO (DR. INFIERNO) - Ooooooookay…how do I describe Dr. Inferno in a coherent and readable manner?…sorry, I can’t! That would take literary mastery I’m not in possession of, because Dr. Inferno (please excuse the fact that I don’t remember it’s proper foreign name but if that’s all I don’t remember consider yourself well informed) is one crazy ass random movie the likes of which not seen before and likely never again. This was one of the selections at the A Night of Horror Film Festival I attended in April, which is of no surprise because the day mainstream cinemas start showing films like this is the day Uwe Boll wins an Academy Award, or an Asylum film gets described as ‘original’. Let’s see, there’s this big ass muscular nurse who gets into a tussle with a hitman, and some guy who unknowingly winds up screwing his dead girlfriend, the three cross paths with Dr. Inferno, a scientist who on his days off of Nazi like experimentation has created the cure for all the worlds disease and is now demanding control of the world. At points between the beginning and the end there’s boulder sized testicular growth, zombie’s, half human half animal like creatures, an actual man/bear/pig, the muscular nurse mentioned earlier becomes the hulk, and after all of that it gets weirder! Chances are this movie will never see the light of day (though it should), for hours afterward the only thing I would think was; “What, the fuck, did I just witness!?”. See it, even if you have to de-limb a granny or three.

DANNY’S HONORABLE MENTIONS

KIRKDALE - A short film shown at the A Night of Horror Film Festival, Kirkdale is a little piece of glory about a small town cop who’s trying to get his freak on with a rather nonreciprocating gal when an escaped mental patient crashes their back seat party, being the good man that he is, Mr. Lawman takes her back to the local nuthouse, what following 15 minutes is violent as fuck and gory as hell. I physically reacted to a moment in the film (and you’ll know it if you ever see it) by leaping out and almost over my fucking seat.

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN - Okay so it wasn’t as faithful to Barker’s story as one might hope but what can you do when the resulting movie is still a bad ass little thrill ride drenched in glorious gore!?

TEETH - After a gander at the banned poster for this one I knew I had to see it come hell or high water. A vagina that can eat you back! (lame I know but it had to he said! Ha).

MURDER LOVES KILLERS TOO - I laughed so hard I almost lost all bowel control whilst watching this, never have I laughed so much in movie as I did in Murder Loves Killers Too. It’s a campy little slasher flick that’s aware of it’s own existence and plays within it’s boundaries blah blah blah, we know how it all goes by now. But seriously (or not so seriously as the case may be) Big Stevie (the killer) has a special place in my heart for his shining moment towards the end.

ZOMBIE STRIPPERS - I expected nothing more than zombies stripping and guess what! I got zombie stripping AND Robert Englund.

…AND THE MISSES

5. DEATH RACE - I hate Paul W.S. Anderson, I really do hate the man, I hate him as much as I hate Michael “fuck up this movie” Bay. With Death Race 2000 set solidly in his sights, Anderson wanted to make an homage to the good old days of 70’s car chase movies, he wanted to make something that kicked ass, he wanted to make a good movie, did he? Do I really need to answer that!? Fuck no he did not, what he made was a painful piece of plop, it was boring as batshit and as dumb as can be, which is terrible thing as is but even worse when you realize that dammit a Death Race remake could have been fucking cool. Instead we get another Paul W.S. Anderson victim, mind you I was never that big a fan of the original but it was a fuck-sight better than this. It’s not quite as fuck you-able as AVP but then again Death Race 2000 was no Alien or Predator. I have no problem with Statham, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is one of my favorite movies of all time, Crank rocked my world and I actually like some things about the Transporter movies (but I’ll wait for the third one to come to DVD before I see it) but the man can only act one way, and it’s describable thus wise; “GRRR”. Then there’s the shitty editing, and the shitty cinematography and the shitty everything for that matter.

4. THE EYE - I’m going to be unoriginal, just like this movie (ha), and join the ranks of about 99% of horror fans out there and say: “yes, I do hate remakes!”, in general they suck, remakes such as The Thing and The Blob are a thing of a past, instead be get pretty teen actors and formulaic bullshit, the only thing you can wonder going into one nowadays is just how much worse could it possibly get? The original The Eye was no stroke of genius but once again the remake makes it look like Citizen Kane by comparison, at least there were moments in it that could be considered marginally creepy, not here though, no instead we get the stupid dialogue and even worse acting.

I’m sure Jessica Alba is a nice person, this is no personal attack but she can’t act her way out of a wet paper bag, she’s cardboard with an expression. And I know why she got cast, it’s as obvious as Monica Lewinsky chin dribble stain, she hot! I get it, I’m not against tits and ass in a horror movie, fuck it’s one of our genres biggest assets (pun intended) but not in a movie that’s meant to be creepy and atmospheric, that’s what we have slashers for!

3. TWILIGHT - *sigh*, just *sigh*. The best thing I can say about Twilight is that now that it’s out I don’t have to put up with seeing all the fucking advertising this sucky little fan-girl marketed piece of nutered crud had going for it! Where do I even begin? Fan-girls all around the world united to gush over the sigh-fest that was Twilight, originally a mushy excuse for a romance/horror novel (horror only in it’s vampiric subject matter and NOTHING else) adapted into its own mushy romance/horror flick, too bad it sucked right, I managed to finish reading the first novel before I saw it and honestly it wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, it was by no means an edge of you seat ass kicker or as emotionally enthralling as I was promised, if anything I was wondering just how little a feminist Stephanie Myer is! I mean the characters life seems devoted Edward! Nothing’s changed with the movie either, she’s just as predatory and stalkerish as her literary counterpart, which was oddly enough one of the few faithful film/novel connections I could make out, a lot of the character development was left out and plenty of necessary dialogue was missing, characters which should have been seen were kept out or held back, the acting was uniformly horrendous, this is meant to be a love story so why did the pair look so fucking awkward around each other!? There was no chemistry between them. And for the last time, VAMPIRES DO NOT FUCKING SPARKLE!!! [Insert angry smiley] Skip this and go see Let the Right One In (a.k.a. A vampire movie that doesn’t suck) or at the very least re-watch Lost Boys.

2. THE HAPPENING - I sensed it. I saw the signs. And yes, it did suck.

I don’t hate M. Night Shyamalamadonicus, he’s not on my list of most hated directors, I mean I even liked some of his movies. The Sixth Sense scared me a little (when I myself were little that is) and there were things in Signs that gave me the creeps (it goes without saying that the ending wasn’t one of them though). And in the wake of Lady in the Water I didn’t think things could get any worse for the poor guys film making career. But then…it happened. The Happening is a universally abysmal excuse for a movie, it’s riddled with gaping plot holes such as the characters boarding up a house to keep the killer gas from getting in (dumb enough as is) but then they decide to leave holes uncovered so they can shoot through………right. Then there’s the hideous dialogue, it’d make even the most literary inept redneck shout aloud: “Haw haw haw, dat man sounded stoopid!” and that man would more than likely be Marky Marky. My friend has a theory that I tend to agree with, it’s that the less known brother is always the better actor, if this is the case then my god is Mark Whalberg doing wonders for Donnie career. It’s too bad M. Night doesn’t have a famous brother of his own.

1. SAW V - Dear fucking god, what hath thou wrought? I’ll tell you what, yet another sequel to the already rock bottom franchise that all spawned from a genuinely good first flick. It’s sad to think of it like that but it’s true, SAW was a good movie, ending and all, but then it all degenerated to a moment last year when I was thinking that it couldn’t get much worse than SAW IV (which was an obscenely bad movie) but of course the celluloidic gods worked hand in hand with cosmic irony to craft a film spun from from only the finest material of pure suckage, and thus SAW V was allowed to come into existance. I would watch SAW IV a thousand times before I lay eyes on V ever again, I do honestly mean that, if anything I have discovered a new appreciation for SAW IV, it at least had action in some way shape or form. SAW V had NONE, it was boring as hell fuck it could have passed for a TV movie it was that freaking dull. The characters were little more than cardboard cut outs, Costas Mandylor had one face throughout the entire movie, and the film main character existed for the sole purpose of spelling out the film none existent plot, he was the super exposition man with psychic powers (that’s sort of true actually) the only thing he did the entire movie was go from evidence piece to evidence piece and flashback, which brings me to the fact that 90% of this thing was constructed of flashbacks much like its predecessor. If there’s any one thing you could expect from the SAW movies it’s interesting traps. Nope, none of them were even the least bit interesting, the final trap sucked most of all if only for its shear absurdity (much like the rest of the movie). Not surprisingly the only passable aspect of the film were the scenes with Tobin Bell, but even those left something to be desired. There was nothing redeeming about SAW V. Nothing.

DANNY’S DISHONORABLE MENTIONS

DIARY OF THE DEAD - What a sad set of affairs, I love zombies and I love George Romero, I don’t love Diary of the Dead. I wanted to like it but could get over the extended periods of boring. I understand what Romero was trying to say but it felt like he fell way short. Still my hopes aren’t crushed for his follow up …of the Dead.

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE - Lack of care or expectations prevented this from being that big of a disappointment, it was gory but it still sucked something terrible.

MIRRORS (a.k.a. 24/every ghost movie ever made crossover) - Now this was a disappointment, leading up until I saw it I was expecting good things from Aja’s new flick, the previews looked good but sadly the resulting movie was a massive dissapointment. Could have been something but became nothing.

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE - *Snore*