The Willies (1990)

A strange mix of comedy and horror aimed mainly at children (I would say the perfect age range for this is about 10-13), The Willies is an anthology film that makes the mistake of not maintaining the energy and fun of its opening sequence.

Sean Astin, Jason Horst, and Joshua John Miller are three kids spending a night together in a tent. Which means they obviously start to tell one another scary stories. After a few “appetisers” it is on to the mains. Story one involves a young, put-upon, school student who discovers a creature that will happily munch on anyone it catches. Story two involves a teenager who is obsessed with dead flies, even putting them into biscuits that he then tries to get others to eat. 

Written and directed by Brian Peck, an actor who has only helmed this one film, The Willies is easy to see appealing to younger viewers, if they can be patient through the less horrifying moments. Think of a cross between Goosebumps and any American TV show that just depicts a couple of main characters being deemed as outcasts in their school and you should know the tone. Peck does well when it comes to the scares, knowing just how far to push things with the tension and occasional gore effects, but he sets everyone up for some disappointment by presenting a strong opening that the rest of the film never equals.

The child actors already mentioned do just fine in their wraparound section. Ian Fried is a decent young lead, playing Danny Hollister in the first main story about the creature in the school, but Michael Bower isn’t given enough to help make him worth journeying with throughout the second story. Genre fans will have fun seeing the likes of Kimmy Robertson, James Karen, Kathleen Freeman, and a few other familiar faces in supporting roles.

I am fairly sure that I have heard some friends refer to this film with some fondness, and I guess seeing it at the right time would explain that. Although not a great anthology, nor a great kid’s film, it’s a fantastic gateway. But even then . . . you could always just pick the wonderful “Eerie, Indiana”.

6/10

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Prime Time: Dead Ant (2019)

AKA Giant Killer Ants.

There seems to be something about ants in movies. Modern films just don't seem to be able to make good use of them. While we had the likes of Them!, It Happened At Lakewood Manor (AKA Ants!), The Naked Jungle, Phase IV, and (one I have a soft spot for) Empire Of The Ants many decades ago, nothing in the 21st century seems to have managed to use our hard-working insectoid friends.

You can always find a selection of films to scare arachnophobes. But for the ants? I can only think of It Came From The Desert, The Hive, and this one. And The Hive is one I have yet to see. Maybe it's the best of the three. It's certainly unlikely to be the worst.

Dead Ant is a film about a rock group travelling to a festival to play a set. The group has their best days behind them, but this performance may give them a boost. Their manager (Tom Arnold) is certainly hoping for that result. But all of that pales into insignificance when there is some cursed peyote smoked that then leads to an assortment of pesky ants, growing larger in size every time one is killed.

Although writer-director Ron Carlson doesn't do a terrible job here, he doesn't do anything particularly great either. The script isn't as funny as it could be, the ant attacks aren't all that exciting, and the only highlights are some amusing gore gags in the third act (especially moments that show a character losing their hands).

Thankfully, the cast are all game, almost all of them giving more to the material than it deserves. Arnold is fine, if you don't mind his schtick, in the role of the manager who has made it his life's work to look after one band, and both Sean Astin and Jake Busey are very entertaining as band members, given fine support from everyone else onscreen, whether they are portraying temperamental musicians, disruptive girlfriends, or festival attendees.

I REALLY wanted to like Dead Ant, mainly because the cast take on their roles with such gusto (and it has an amusingly cheeky opening that shows a young woman discarding her clothing while being chased down by a giant beastie). But it never does enough to make it a decent entry in this particular subgenre of the creature feature realm. I just couldn't stop thinking about better movies, even when the film was supposedly working through an action-packed final act (that also left me cold).

Not enough laughs, no tension, not enough bloodshed, Dead Ant is disappointingly lifeless. Maybe the NEXT killer ant movie will buck the trend. I won't hold my breath though.

4/10

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Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (2014)

For anyone interested, here is my review of Cabin Fever, and here is my review of Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. And now . . . . . . we return to our main programmed event.

Let's face it, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is a movie that shouldn't really exist. The first Cabin Fever movie is fantastic (despite me taking a while to warm to it), but it didn't exactly cry out for sequels. When Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever was released, I think there was more talk of the studio interference and problems that director Ti West had than an overwhelming love for the movie. And, on a side note, kudos to West for still visiting some screenings and pragmatically dealing with the end result.

Anyway, now we have a third movie, with the potential for more (I guess). Sean Astin plays the patient zero of the title, a man who is imprisoned, in a medical facility that's located on a fairly isolated island, and forced to try and help find a cure for the deadly disease that viewers of the previous two movies will already be familiar with. Astin doesn't want to be helpful. In fact, he wants to cause some problems. Which makes everything exceedingly dangerous when Marcus (Mitch Ryan) and friends land on the island, aiming to party and celebrate before Marcus gets married. It's not long until people start acting a bit rash.

Written by Jake Wade Wall and directed by Kaare Andrews, this is very standard sequel stuff. It's supposed to be a prequel, but I must confess my ignorance in not being able to see anything that would really pinpoint the timing of this particular instalment in comparison to the other movies. I may have missed a detail or two, but I suspect that this has been classed as a prequel due to the folk making it thinking that they're being clever. Because that's what I felt as the end credits rolled, with some other footage running throughout. This is a film with a script that is desperate to appear cool and clever, despite the fact that it isn't. Andrews tries to work with it, and at least remembers to include some great gore gags in the second half, but nothing ties together as it should.

The cast here is a real mixed bag. For the group arriving on the island, Mitch Ryan is okay, I guess, but he just feels a bit too bland to be a leading man. Thankfully, both Brando Eaton and Ryan Donowho match him in terms of just being a bit too unmemorable, although nobody is awful. Jillian Murray IS memorable, for a variety of reasons, and she gets a lot of great scenes. Elsewhere, Currie Graham is the cold doctor dealing with Astin, while Solly Duran and Lydia Hearst are the two main lab assistants also caught in the crisis zone when things start to turn sour.

There are some great special effects, courtesy of Vincent J. Guastani and his team, some fun moments in which selfishness is punished (of course), and one or two good ideas in the mix, but that undeserved sense of cockiness brings it back down a notch or two. As does the lack of any effective black humour.

Worth a watch, and even worth picking up if you can get it at a good price, but it's the weakest of the three.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cabin-Fever-Patient-Zero-Blu-ray/dp/B00GMFL9BQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1392807180&sr=8-2&keywords=cabin+fever+patient+zero