It's that time of year again and we here at Jigsaws Lair are getting ready for a night of horror! Great horror movies will be watched and lots of scares are mandatory! So, whatever way you are spending your Halloween, enjoy it and make sure that you get at least one good scare!!!
Another season of American Horror story has started and this time it is set in an asylum. Some of the actors from the first series have returned as different characters. Jessica Lange, Zachary Quinto and Evan Peters are back in different guises.
The series begins with a couple going into an old asylum in the present day. They are on their honeymoon and they are exploring supposedly haunted places. The asylum has a long history and it was a place of misery in the past and people who were sent there rarely came out. They are wandering around when the husband gets attacked by something. Cut to 1964 and Kit Walker(Peters) is working in a gas station. He is married to a black woman and they are hiding it from the locals as they would not approve.
He and his wife get abducted by aliens and he is taken onto their ship. Cut to Lana Winters(Sarah Paulson) who is a journalist looking for a big story. She comes to an asylum called Briarcliff with an idea of uncovering what it is really like to be in there but she pretends that she wants to do a story on their bakery. She meets the nun in charge,Sister Jude(Lange). Sister Jude sees through her facade and doesn't think that she should be there.
A serial killer called Bloody Face is going to be admitted to the asylum. It is none other than Kit Walker who has been accused of being Bloody Face after his wife was killed. He tries to protest his innocence.
He meets a girl called Grace(Lizzie Brochere) who was accused of murdering her family. She seems sane and they talk. There is a crazy doctor there called Dr. Arden(James Cromwell) who is performing experiments on the patients. Patients are disappearing and Sister Jude is not happy. She talks to the Monsignor (Joseph Fiennes) about it but he won't listen. She has fantasies about him. Another nun called Sister Mary Eunice(Lily Rabe) is helping out the doctor with his experiments. She meets Lana who is snooping around the asylum trying to expose the mistreatment of the patients, but she ends up getting committed herself. Cut to present day and the couple are trying to escape from the house but they end up meeting Bloody Face.
A good start to the next series. There is a lot going on so you would have to follow this from the first episode, but it is very good and the actors are good in it too. I am interested to see what is going to happen next!
Last season on The Walking Dead, we saw the group on the road near a prison. Rick had taken control of the group and got some balls at last!
Episode 1 begins with the group on the road. They are killing the zombies as they go but they are tired and Lori is almost ready to give birth. They are out of food and they need a place to go and regroup.
Rick decides that they need to get into the prison. It is surrounded by zombies outside, but they have no choice but to try and get in. They go in as a group with some of them distracting the zombies while others slip inside. They battle their way through the zombies and manage to get into the prison itself.
There are plenty more zombies around. They kill most of them in their little area and they can rest for a while.
Lori and Rick are not on the best of terms after the death of Shane. Rick is concentrating on keeping them all alive. Meanwhile, Michonne and Andrea are together and Andrea is very sick. They are holed up somewhere, but Andrea tells her that she will die if they don't get on the road. They decide to go and find a more secure place to stay. Rick and the others look around the prison and find themselves swamped by zombies. They have to retreat but Hershel manages to get his leg bitten by a walker and Rick has to chop it off. He is bleeding heavily. They suddenly see what they think are more walkers, but they are human!!!!
A good start to the third series. There was loads of action and it was very entertaining...I'm looking forward to the next episode!
Child's Play is a 1988 horror movie directed by Tom Holland(Fright Night,The Langoliers) and starring
Catherine Hicks(Seventh Heaven), Brad Dourif(Deadwood,Halloween) and Chris Sarandon(Fright Night,The Princess Bride).
Serial killer Charles Lee Ray(Brad Dourif) is being chased by cop Mike Norris(Sarandon). They are shooting at each other and they end up in a toy store. Ray gets shot and his evil spirit goes into a doll called a Good Guy. Ray knows voodoo and he transfers his evil into the doll. Cut to youngster Andy(Alex Vincent) who lives with his mother Karen(Hicks). He really wants a Good Guy doll but his mother can't afford it. While she is at work, she discovers a dodgy guy selling them at a reduced cost in an alley behind the store. She buys one from him. The dolls name happens to be Chucky! She gives it to Andy and he loves it. They become inseparable. But Chucky is no ordinary doll. He just happens to be the reincarnation of Charles Lee Ray and he is hellbent on getting out of the plastic doll body!
Chucky begins to kill people. The first one is a friend of Karen's.She had been babysitting Andy at the time and Chucky made her fall out of the window. Andy is upset and so is Karen when she comes home.
Cop Mike Norris is on the case. They find small footprints in the house and Norris thinks that Andy might have had something to do with it. The next day, Chucky tells Andy to cut school and he takes him on a journey to an old house. Chucky goes inside and he finds his old pal Eddie who ran off and left him to face the cops. He kills him.Andy figures out that Chucky is alive and dangerous and he tries to tell people but he ends up in a hospital as everyone thinks that he has problems. Karen looks at Chucky and realises that he is talking but there are no batteries in him! Chucky attacks her. He escapes and she tries to tell Norris about it, but he thinks that she is crazy!
Chucky attacks Mike and Mike realises that Karen wasn't crazy after all. Chucky gets Andy and he tries to put his evil spirit into the boy. Mike and Karen race to get to him before he can do more damage. They try to kill him and eventually they do. Somehow you know that Chucky will be back!! This film is great fun and it comes across as more of a comedy than horror. Brad Dourif does well as the voice of Chucky and the movie is very entertaining. If you are looking for a good comedy/horror, then this is for you.I am giving it an 8/10.
House of Fears is a 2007 horror movie directed by Ryan Little and starring Corri English,Sandra McCoy and Corey Sevier.
The movie begins with a woman buying an ancient relic in Africa. It it cursed. She takes it back to America. Cut to two girls,Hailey(Sandra McCoy) and her stepsister Samantha(English) who are going to a party together. Samantha is the quieter of the two and Hailey resents her because of her mother marrying Hailey's father. They go to the party and a group of their friends decide to go to a place called The House of Fears. It is a haunted house type of place and one of them has a key. They go inside and look around. There are different doors in the place and each of them have different fears behind them.
All of the group have different fears and they think that it is just a bit of fun.
As they wander around inside the house, it becomes apparent that the fun is over. They begin to die one by one and they get killed in the way that they had feared. They realise that it might have something to do with a weird little statue that they had found earlier. Hailey and Samantha are left inside the house and they need to escape before their fears kill them too. They are chased by killers and they have to break the statue to break the spell that it holds. Sam smashes it into pieces and they escape the house, but while they are free, the pieces of the statue are coming back together again...
A mediocre horror movie. I liked the way that the characters' fears were used to kill them. That was interesting but other than that, it wasn't anything special. It was worth a watch, but I won't be watching it again. It gets a 5/10.
Chained is a 2012 thriller/horror written and directed by Jennifer Lynch(yes, daughter of David Lynch) and starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Eamon Farren.
Sarah Fittler(Julia Ormond in a very small role) and her son, Tim(Evan Bird) are spending the day together and they decide to take a taxi home. They soon realise that the driver of the cab has missed their turn and they scream at him, but he ignores them. He drives them out to the middle of nowhere where his house is and he takes the mother away as the kid screams. He comes back later, bloody and he tells the kid that his mother won't be coming back. He tells the kid that he will call him Rabbit and that he will be his servant. He trains him to do everything for him and he has him attached to a chain when he tries to escape. It turns out that the killer is Bob(D'Onofrio) and he is a serial killer. He uses his cab to pick up victims. Rabbit becomes an unwilling participant in cleaning up after the kills.
Cut to years later and Rabbit is older now and played by Eamon Farren. Rabbit is still serving Bob and living on a chain. Bob tells him that he wants him to read up about the human body and learn things.
He wants him to follow in his footsteps and start killing too. Rabbit is not interested. Bob brings back a girl for him to get laid, but Rabbit won't do anything. Bob kills her anyway. He has a high school yearbook and he makes Rabbit choose a girl from that so that he can have his first sexual experience.
Rabbit is amazed when the girl is brought back and he is expected to have sex with her. He doesn't want to. He pretends to kill her and he takes her down to the basement where he tells her to wait until she can escape. Bob finds out and they fight. Rabbit kills Bob and he frees the girl(or does he?). Rabbit goes to visit his father who has since remarried and had another kid. He tells his dad that he knows that Bob was his uncle who took him in when Rabbit's dad paid Bob to kill his wife Sara and son Tim.
It turns out that Tim's dad is a bully too and as he attacks his wife when she tries to intervene between them, Tim kills him. The wife tells him to get out and she will pretend that a burglar broke in and killed her husband.Tim returns to the house where he was kept for so many years and we hear him getting into the cab at the end of the movie. Is he going to become a serial killer like his captor?? This movie was very slow in parts and some of the actions of the kid didn't make sense. He had chance after chance to kill Bob, but he didn't. He could have tried to escape many times, but chose not to. He found a knife on one of the victims, but it was never seen again.I know that he might have been traumatised but it just didn't ring true. The ending was a little silly too. He just killed his dad and the wife covered for him. That just seemed weird to me. The fact that Bob was his uncle was not a huge twist, it was more like a groan.All in all, D'Onofrio was very good in this as he always is in films and he carried this movie. If he hadn't been in it, I would have turned it off. Some good parts, but slow in others, this is getting a 5/10.
The Victim is a 2011 straight to DVD movie written, directed and starring Michael Biehn (Terminator,Aliens) and his wife Jennifer Blanc(Party of Five,Dark Angel). This is a grindhouse movie and it was shot in only 11 days which explains a lot!
The action begins with a woman running through the woods, obviously being chased by someone. She arrives at the cabin of Kyle(Biehn) begging for help. He lets her inside and he asks her what happened to her. She tells him that she and her friend,Mary(Danielle Harris) were with two men having fun when it all turned into a nightmare. Mary was murdered by one of them. The woman's name is Annie(Blanc) and she tells Kyle that she realised what had happened to her pal and she was afraid that they would kill her next so she ran.They are called Cooger(Denny Kirkwood) and Harrison(Ryan Honey) who is a cop.
Kyle is a bit taken aback by all of this and he tells her that he will take her into town. Harrison and Cooger show up at the cabin looking for Annie. They tell him that she is wanted.Kyle pretends that he hasn't seen her. They leave and Annie tries to convince Kyle that she isn't a troublemaker. She tells him that she will take him to see the body. They drive off to find it. They reach the spot, but Mary isn't there. In the middle of all this, Annie and Kyle have sex. Kyle goes outside and Harrison breaks in and finds Annie.
He takes her hostage and waits for Kyle. He and Kyle fight and Kyle knocks him out. He ties him up and asks him some questions. Harrison tries to bargain with Kyle and tells him that Annie is not who she seems. They take Harrison out to find the body but he can't.
Cooger shows up with a gun and Harrison has the upper hand. He beats Kyle up and he wants to kill him and Annie and burn the cabin. Cooger doesn't want to do it. Annie manages to get the gun from Cooger and she shoots him. She helps Kyle and he manages to kill Harrison. He buries the bodies and he and Annie talk about serial killers and she begins to realise that Kyle is not all that he seems....
This is an entertaining thriller and it is the directorial debut of Biehn so you have to give him credit as it is obvious that he had little money to make this. It isn't going to blow you away with special effects or great acting, but it is definitely worth a watch. Biehn obviously put a lot of work into this, so see it if you can....I'll be nice and give it a 5/10.
