Lake Placid 2 is a sad parody of the witty original. the set-up is the same - people are going missing and then getting attacked/eaten on a peaceful Maine lake. Luckily, the filmmakers just gave up and went for the camp, knowing this film could never be taken seriously. But it's not even campy enough to be really good.
I really enjoyed The Brothers Bloom, the second feature from writer/director Rian Johnson ("Brick"). In some ways, it feels like a Wes Anderson ("The Drjeeling Limited"), but Johnson has darkness Anderson will never possess. The story follows two con artist brothers through some early exploits and then a "last great heist," because one of the brothers, Adrian Brody ("Cadillac Records") wants out. But he falls for a girl, Rachel Weisz ("Definitely, Maybe") in a contingency that his brother, Mark Ruffalo ("Blindness"), couldn't plan for. Or could he? It's fun, funny, sometimes sad, but always entertaining. Loved it.
Looking at the ratings fro Quarantine, they're not very high. This surprises me as I found the film to be a tense, often frightening, entry into the zombie genre. It starts slow as a local reporter, Jennifer Carpenter ("Dexter"), plans to follow some firefighters around for the evening. Almost all shots are from the handheld point-of-view of her cameraman. The early ones establishing the team and the firemen. But as they go to the first call, they find something strange and then are locked in the building by what seems to be the army. Not zombies in the traditional sense, but zombie-esque in the spreading and of the disease and trapping of the victims. Very watchable.
Outbreak came on AMC the other day and I thought it would be fun to revisit, because, if there's something I love almost as much as bad horror, it's apocalyptic disaster. A deadly airborne virus pretty much takes out a small town and the army will do almost anything to keep it contained. And cover up where the disease originated. Anyway, the movie is just okay now. Still frightening in it's plausibility. Especially on the heels of this swine flu scare. But the acting is kind of blah. And it does seem to drag on, though the actual running time is only a few minutes over two hours. Not a bad watch, but not as good as I remembered.
I watched Calvaire (The Ordeal) a few weeks back and found it seriously disturbing. A singer's van breaks down in some remote woods and he finds shelter at a local inn where he's the only guest. And then things just get super, super, super weird. It's not anything you haven't seen before, it's just the way this is put together. There are moments of silence that make you twitch and long for sound. And then music that just gets under your skin. And then the images, not graphic per se, simply a nightmare you wish you and the main character could escape. This is a film I won't soon forget.