Winter's Bone Movie Review

Jennifer Lawrence plays a seventeen-year-old girl, Ree, who sets out in search for her missing meth cook father. Ree must either find him or evidence of his death within a week or her father's bail bondsman will repo the family home. This begins Ree’s journey among the meth-ruined lives of her nearby extended family.

Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of a strong-willed, tenacious young women, trying to look out for her younger siblings and her mentally ill mother, was outstanding (defiantly her best performance to date.) The film has subtle feminist undertones, and because of its detective story style, it has also been labeled 'country noir' by some. It's a solid enough drama. Its only weakness is it takes a while to get going and it gets a little repetitive and loses momentum in places, but Jennifer Lawrence's performance shines through and manages to hold it all together.

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Dead Snow (2009)

This low budget Norwegian zombie flick shouldn't really work, but it does. Filled with every single horror movie cliche and trope, it's one of those films that are ridiculous in a good way. The story revolve around a group of medical students on holiday in the remotest part of the Norwegian wilderness they could find.

The characters are the biggest cliche of all, from the deadlocked women who looks like a predator, the quintessential attractive blondes, to the fat film geek guy - who is the source of many a horror movie reference during the film.

After the unlikely group settle in, the not so unlikely drunken party starts, a party which is soon interrupted by a knock of the door of the cabin...The knock is the local weirdo with a scary tail to tell. The man proceeds to tell the group about the legend of a lost Nazi battalion whose evil presence remains on the mountain.

Well it doesn't take long before the man's fears are realized, and the group soon start dropping like flies, and it drops to a few remaining to survivors to face the ravenous army of Nazi zombies. The group of remaining characters, one resembling Ash from Evil Dead, with an amputated arm and chainsaw combo, dispense with the zombie horde in more and more over-the-top and super gory ways.

The special effects are pretty convincing for such a low budget indie film, and each zombie death is more original and mega gory  than the next. Dead Snow is good old-fashioned comedy horror fun. A little indie gem which is up there among the best comedy horrors that I've seen.

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Dead End (2003)

On Christmas Eve Frank Harrington (Ray Wise) is driving  his family to his in-laws for Christmas and decides to take a shortcut. Things soon start to go wrong, as the road they are on seems neverending and they are terrorized by the ghost of a young woman.

The film is described as a 'horror thriller' on its IMDb page, but to me it seemed more like a comedy, mainly due to the hilarious antics of Frank Harrington himself. With constant over-the-top reactions and wise cracks, Ray Wise is hilarious in this film. With his dum daughter, annoying son in-law and crazy wife nagging him all the way, he soon starts to crack up.

The family members soon start disappearing one by one, and the last you see of them are their faces stuck to the back window of a mysterious black hurse which drives past them in part of some morbid death ritual.

The film feels like a horror version of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. By the way they are set up, even the scares seem like they are meant to be funny rather than scary. Dead End isn't to be taken seriously as a horror, even if that was what the director intended.

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Let Me In (2010)

I've been putting off watching Let Me In because I've always thought it to be an unnecessary remake. Adapted from the Swedish horror novel  Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was earlier adapted into a Swedish film of the same name. Let Me In is a vampire romance in which a young bullied boy befriends a vampire girl.

The mysterious girl, Abby, moves into the same apartment block as the little boy, Owen, and a their friendship begins. Abby has a carer, a hard-faced middle aged man, who kills people and drains their to feed her.

Local people begin to disappear and a detective begin investigating. Things eventually go wrong during one of the mans blood-letting expeditions, and to prevent exposing abbey and to prevent him being identified by the police, he burns his face off with acid. Abby is left alone with only one person she can confide in - her new friend Owen.

Though the film is similar to the Swedish film, there have been slight alterations made to the story, which is a good thing - no one wants to watch a carbon copy of the original film with the only difference being the language. The dark, dreary, melancholy atmosphere that made the original unique is present, and the chemistry between the Owen and Abby is perfect.

I personally still prefer Let The Right In, but there isn't much between the two films for me. Let Me In is an entertaining, well directed remake, and is probably the best horror remake since Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead; its also at the opposite end of the remake spectrum to the terrible Carrie.

I told you to get your hair cut..but you wouldn't listen!

This scene is a stomach churner - throat cutting scenes always go through me though. The claret is flowing throughout the film, there are some nice burn-gore scenes as well.

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American Psycho (2000)

Adapted from the dark and brilliant book of the same name, American Psycho is an ironic, dark, and dam right hilarious social satire.

Its central character, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is a yuppie of 27 in Wall Street in 1986, obsessed with status symbols, self-confessedly as empty of feeling as his gleaming desk top is of honest labour.
He escorts us through his morning agenda of toilet ablutions, bathroom anointment and wardrobe adornments as if man were the sum of his beauty products.

Feeling alienated by his yuppie lifestyle, he embarks on a psychopathic killing spree: murdering colleges, homeless people, animals, and prostitutes.


His wall-flush stainless-steel refrigerator is stocked with a human head, for snacks. Before he teasingly deliberates whether to use chainsaw or nail-gun on his female victims, he treats them to an extended criticism of the CD he feels suits his slaughterous mood. Phil Collins comes off best.

The social satire and subtle critique of the yuppie culture is apparent throughout. Everyone looks the same--perfectly groomed, nice haircuts and expensive suits. They share one interest --money--and that's all they care about. Everyone is having an affair, and getting up all sorts of debauchery in private, but in public they are all respectable, well educated, pillars of society.

However, the facade of respectability is beginning to slip for Patrick Bateman. A detective begins to investigate the disappearance of the college he chopped up with an axe, and his secretory becomes concerned about his erratic behavior.

In the end though, no one suspects him of anything, even after he confesses to his lawyer. Even the detective seems to respect him, and at no point suspects him of foul-play. As far a society is concerned, Patrick Bateman remains a respectable business man. If the film proves anything, its that money talks.

 

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Martyrs (2008)

Pound for pound, Martyrs is probably the most disturbing film I've ever seen, and also one of the best horror films of the past fifteen years.

The film starts as a blood-splattered child is found fleeing an industrial complex in 1971. Fifteen years later, she and a friend seek revenge. Some very bad shit happens. The girls plan works perfectly, resulting in the grizzly murders of a family they suspect of kidnapping the one them fifteen years prior.

However, things for the girls quickly take a turn for the worse. As it turns out the family are members of a sinister secret organization of people who enjoy inflicting enormous amounts of pain and suffering on people in secret dungeons, which doesn't bowed well for the girls.



When the organizations heavies arrive, one of the girls, Anna, ends up being imprisoned in a bunker/torture chamber. Then her long ordeal begins, during which time she becomes victim to all manor of degrading, demoralizing and torturous abuse. This period of imprisonment is where the film gets its notorious reputation from, the torture scenes are truly hard to watch, and a times left me wishing that they would just put her out of her misery.

There are curtain religious undertones in the film. The idea of purification through psychical pain is a part many religions, Christianity especially. The film, in its own extreme and graphic way, brings the questions of our mortality, god and the existence of the afterlife to light, making it a more thought provoking film then one might expect. Martyrs is a technically brilliant, emotionally resonant, disturbing, mind-bender of a film, that will stay in your head for along time after viewing.

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