Nightbreed (1990)

"Everything is true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live"

Nightbreed is a typically ambitious piece of work from horror maestro Clive Barker. It's full of strange monsters, moments of impressive bloodshed, and a mythos that is quickly set up and invested in, to an impressive degree. I wish I had seen it a long time ago, because it's a new favourite of mine.

Craig Sheffer plays a troubled young man named Aaron Boone. Aaron has been seeing a doctor (David Cronenberg) for some time, due to his dreams about monsters and a place named Midian, but has finally started to feel better. Unfortunately, a bunch of ugly murders have occurred that seem to match Aaron's fantasies. The doctor claims to want to help Aaron, but it soon becomes apparent that he may have another agenda. And then things start to get REALLY interesting after Aaron finds out that he's not as mad as he thought.

Setting things up quickly, and rarely flagging as the plot unfolds, Nightbreed is a film I can't find too many faults with, much to my surprise. Yes, you have to buy into the main premise, but it's never a bad move to trust Barker when he's attempting to provide horror fans with smart, unique, adult entertainment. If you think that monsters are things to be imagined, and feared, by children then you should be thinking again after the first few scenes of this movie. Not only does it present the main monsters as outcasts from society, not necessarily meaning harm to others, yet willing to stand up and fight back when it's called for, but it also takes great pains to show different types of monsters, with a couple being in the more usual human guise.

I know that fans of this movie can recall all of the different names of the monstrous characters, and know who played who, but I'm not going to pretend that I was always able to keep track of such details. Give me one or two repeat viewings, and this is a film I plan to rewatch a number of times, and I'll retain more of the details, but for the time being I'll just admit that a lot of the wonderful creatures all blended together into one impressive group for me. That's not to say that they didn't have individual personalities and characteristics. They really did. I was just overwhelmed by so many wonderful details catching my eye in almost every scene.

Sheffer is fine in the lead role, although he's never been my favourite actor (sorry, I just couldn't ever really get over his fine turn as a major asshole in Some Kind Of Wonderful), and Anne Bobby is cute and sweet as the woman who cares for him. Cronenberg is a bit of a strange casting choice, so you may think, and his early scenes feel slightly frustrating and out of place, but that's all forgotten when he hits his stride after the first 15-20 minutes. Hugh Quarshie is yet another authority figure, a role he seems to have played for the majority of his career, but he's good at it, and Charles Haid is entertainingly over the top as a Police Captain. Catherine Chevalier and Hugh Ross are two main monsters I enjoyed watching onscreen (see, I did manage to keep track of some of them), and pretty much everyone onscreen, whether or not they end up covered in prosthetics, does a great job helping to realise the world and characters envisioned by Barker.

It's not often that work adapted from Barker's material ends up falling flat (who said Rawhead Rex? Hold your tongue) and Nightbreed holds up as a fine reminder that when the man is allowed to translate his vision from mental imagery to page to screen . . . . . . . . . . we horror fans are in for a major treat.

9/10

http://www.amazon.com/Nightbreed-Directors-Bluray-Combo-Blu-ray/dp/B00LMBUR6S/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1413707229&sr=1-1&keywords=nightbreed

Battledogs (2013)

When a young woman (Ariana Richards) turns a bit funny as she arrives at a New York airport she ends up causing quite a major situation. You see, she infects a number of people with what becomes known as the lupine virus. That means that when people get agitated they turn into werewolves. Vicious werewolves that appear to have jumped out of the nearest Playstation One. Anyway, Craig Sheffer and Kate Vernon play two people wanting to find a cure and help the situation, Dennis Haysbert is an uncaring military leader who wants to harness the power of the lupine virus and weaponise it, and Ernie Hudson pops up just long enough for fans of Ghostbusters to say: "look, Ernie Hudson."

This is how the main creatures look

Directed by Alexander Yellen and written by Shane Van Dyke, Battledogs may be full of horrible dialogue, uneven acting and special effects so bad that they will make your eyes water, but it also manages to be surprisingly enjoyable. God knows that I was expecting to do little more than endure this one, I'm as surprised as anyone else to have found a number of redeeming features.

THIS is a battledog!!!!!!!

The first redeeming feature is the cast. Although they are given the unenviable task of trying to polish a turd, forgive the expression, most of them still try to sell the ridiculous premise. Haysbert may be given the worst treatment by the script, but Sheffer, Hudson, Richards and Vernon all fare slightly better. They're not giving great performances, but they don't do too badly. Of course, maybe I was just expecting a LOT worse.

The second redeeming feature is the pacing of the thing. This starts off at a fair pace and never really lets up until the very end. Yes, there are inevitable moments of downtime but nothing ever gets so bad that you start clockwatching.

Third, there's just a healthy sense of fun about the whole thing. It's not being tongue-in-cheek, it's not trying to be some minor cult hit, but this aims to please. Despite the relatively small budget, it throws in many creature moments and keeps trying to punch above its weight. Most of those punches miss, but it's hard not to grudgingly admire the attempt.

Battledogs is NOT a good movie, yet I didn't hate it. I could bring myself to watch it again. But only if I really had to.

4/10


http://www.amazon.com/Battledogs-Blu-ray-Haysbert/dp/B00BMUL966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380191348&sr=8-1&keywords=battledogs

THIS?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Bad Ass (2012)

Danny Trejo is a badass. You know it, I know it, everyone has been well aware of it for years now. But in this movie he IS Bad Ass. He gets his own theme tune and everything, which makes it all impossible to deny.

Springboarding from a real incident (shown here on YouTube), Bad Ass is all about Frank Vega (played by Trejo), a man who hasn't had much luck since the days that he spent serving his country in the war. Time and opportunities kept slipping away from him until he was an old man without much in his life. But all of that changes when he retaliates against two thugs on a bus and the whole incident is recorded by witnesses and uploaded online. Frank becomes a hero though he doesn't think of himself as a hero. He just wants to get on with his life and be left in peace. But it's not long before more violence occurs in his life and he has to continue being a badass while others are left to clear up the mess.

I, and many other movie fans that I know of, think Danny Trejo is great so I'm happy to see him getting more lead roles than ever before. His biggest role might always be Machete but films like this one are good enough to keep fans happy, even if they aren't actually great.

Directed by Craig Moss (who also pitched in here and there to tweak the screenplay by Elliot Tishman), the movie is an easy sell to anyone who has enjoyed films such as Walking Tall, Urban Justice, Death Wish and Harry Brown. The fact that it has Trejo in the lead role and a supporting cast that includes Charles S. Dutton, Ron Perlman, Richard Riehle in a small role and Craig Sheffer in a blink-and-miss-him cameo also helps. Joyful Drake and young John Duffy may not be as well known but they're likeable enough in their roles.

Sadly, other aspects of the movie are quite poor. The action isn't too bad but the script is weak, and laughably bad in places, and the actual plot is a bit cheesy and ridiculous (e.g. the moment in which Frank Vega easily finds some evidence missed by police). Then we have the way in which Frank gets to know his neighbour, Amber Lamps (Drake, playing a character actually named as a nod to the way in which the word "ambulance" was said by the asswhipped idiot in the original, real life event). It's just unbelievable even if it allows for a number of nice domestic scenes showing a softer side of the character, and a softer side of Trejo.

So it's unbelievable at times, cheesy and ridiculous and has a very weak script. Despite those flaws, I still can't help rating the movie above average because Trejo is just so enjoyable in the lead role.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Ass-DVD-Danny-Trejo/dp/B0083TZXSE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347906754&sr=8-1

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000).

The fifth instalment in the Hellraiser franchise is actually a return to form, a solid horror thanks to it’s mixing of the puzzle box ethos with a standard detective storyline. It may not be quite in the neo-noir mould but it comes close and is all the better for it.
 
Craig Sheffer (the guy you could rely on to play a rat bastard in the 80s if James Spader wasn’t available) plays Detective Joseph Thorne, a man who takes money from wallets he finds at crime scenes, has sex with hookers while his wife and daughter sleep at home and generally struts around like the cock of the walk. His partner, Detective Tony Nenonen (Nicholas Turturro), is his partner, he’s not a bad guy but he’s also not as smart as Thorne. When Thorne wakes up in a motel room beside a slaughtered hooker he drags his partner along to help him cover up any evidence that he was there. Something strange is going on. Something linked to a puzzle box and some underworld character known as The Engineer. Thorne is determined to catch this guy despite the warnings that if you hunt The Engineer, The Engineer ends up hunting you. Things get increasingly dark and insane as Thorne gets closer to his target.
 
Directed by Scott Derrickson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Harris Boardman, Hellraiser: Inferno does what the better Hellraiser movies do so well. Instead of aiming for the easy, cheap, slasher-style thrills that parts three and four went for it maintains itself as a movie aimed at adults. Yes, it has the gore and nastiness in there but it also has a certain intelligence and doesn’t feel the need to bring Pinhead onscreen every few minutes just to make a smartass comment.
 
The other big plus that the movie has is the cast. Sheffer is very good in the lead role, Turturro is okay as his partner and the great James Remar is the great James Remar. That covers the three main leads but all of the supporting players also do well.
 
The visuals, the dreamy horror, the new cenobite variations, all of these things are done justice and occasionally mix the sexual with the masochistic in a way close to the original two movies (especially the gruesome scene in which Sheffer is dreaming that he is being lusted over by two strange females).
 
It’s a real shame that people may miss this one because of how poor it’s predecessor is because Hellraiser: Inferno is one of the few sequels that actually deserves to be seen by fans of the franchise. Seek it out if you haven’t seen it already.  

7/10.

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