The Cabin in the Woods Review

"The Cabin in the Woods" is a Lovecraftian love/hate letter to horror films. It has some suspenseful moments, but for the most part, it's a fun romp through slasher flicks, giant monster movies, creature features and foreign horror films. "The Cabin in the Woods" is clever, snarky and constantly pokes fun at just about any horror convention or cliche you can think of, which makes it the best deconstruction of horror movies since "Scream." In fact, this movie invokes more stereotypes and horror tropes than even "Scream" was capable of doing. And for this reason, "The Cabin in the Woods" is freaking hilarious.

"The Cabin in the Woods" starts out a little slow, as two distinct groups of characters are introduced: the suits in the white shirts and ties, ala 1950's NASA style, Sitterson and Hadley, and the normal college kids that transform into the stereotypical slasher film archetypes: the jock Curt; the slut Jules; the virgin Dana; the nerd, Holden; the fool, Marty.

Sitterson, Hadley, and their friend the chemist Lin are heading into the office for another typical work day; complaining about family problems and mundane matters as they make their way to the control panel where all the "magic" happens.

Turns out, the suits are a part of a huge conspiracy that collects groups of young adults and turns them into the perfect human sacrifices by manipulating them with drugs and pheromones to get them to act out the roles that the Chthonic gods, the Ancient Ones, require in order to be satisfied. Failure to kill them means that the gods will awaken, and the world will end.


Sitterson and Hadley are hilarious. They are competing with a unit in Japan, who sent a hungry ghost to kill a room full of nine year old school girls. When the school girls use their Shinto magic to place the ghost into a happy frog (which leads to Sitterson screaming F- you! repeatedly at the screen where the Japanese school girls are cheering after they stop the ghost),  it's up to them to save the world.

Some of the humor of the movie comes from the fact that the characters are forced to become the stereotypical teens found in slasher flicks. For instance, Curt is a sociology major attending college with a full academic scholarship. He is turned into the brain-dead jock. When they arrive at his cousin's cabin, all of the sudden he is wearing a varsity jacket and turns into a beer drinking horn-dog. Curt has a healthy loving relationship with Jules, who was poisoned with "stupid" (chemicals that inhibit the thought processes in the brain) when she dyed her hair blond. Dana was having an affair with her college professor and is turned into the innocent virgin. Holden, the football player with the amazing six-pack abs, turns into a glasses toting, dress shirt wearing girl-shy nerd. Only Marty, the philosophical stoner, is unaffected by the drugs that they are given, mainly because he's such a bud-head.

Soon, the college kids travel to Curt's cousin's cabin for a fun weekend in the woods. While on the way they stop for gas and are greeted by the harbinger of doom; you know, the one ugly dude that warns the meddling kids not to go up to the spooky cabin in the middle of the woods because people that go up there never come back. Of course, they ignore his unsettling warnings.

After they pick their rooms and go for a swim in the lake, they start drinking and playing Truth or Dare. During the game there is a very creepy scene with the slut Jules making out with a stuffed wolf head ( for some reason, that wolf head is so sinister looking that it made me nervous to watch her lock lips with it). Then, suddenly, the trap door to the cellar slams open, scaring the crap out of the college kids.

I still can't believe that the actor that plays Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is in this movie...

The cellar is chock full of objects, each of which are relics that can be used to summon a different type of monster. Back at mission control, the different departments are taking bets on what monsters will appear to kill their sacrificial lambs, as it all depends on who uses their item first.

Personally, I would've bet on Kevin. He's probably terrifying.

Check out that list on the white board. We have Angry Molesting Tree and Deadites from "Evil Dead." Which is a nod to the fact that both "Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead 2" take place in a cabin in the woods.

The Buckners are resurrected after Dana reads aloud a Latin phrase from Patience Buckner's diary. Marty, the stoner and ironically the voice of reason in the film, tells her not to read it out loud, but no one listens to him. Soon, they are stalked by the redneck zombie torture family from hell. (In H.P. Lovecraft stories and "Call of Cthulhu" RPG, you never read the books out loud. They always summon something terrible that will kill you, rob you of your sanity, or devour your soul.)

Marty is the only one that thinks that they are being manipulated, but his friends ignore him because they think that all of the pot he's been smoking has made him paranoid. His suspicions are confirmed once he finds the tiny camera that's been installed in his bedroom on the lamp. Unfortunately, before he can tell the others, they are attacked by the zombie redneck torture family.

Of course, the jock and the slut are killed first for their "transgressions" i.e. showing boobies in the woods and making out. The guys in the control room make comments similar to what an audience might say, such as which character(s) they are rooting for and urging Jules to take off her shirt. Which can be taken as a comment on how the average audience to a slasher film would react by rooting for their favorite characters and telling the hotties to get naked.

When Jules dies, Sitterson and Hadley say a strange prayer and then pull the first lever to release blood into a chalice. Curt runs back to the cabin and the kids try to hide from the zombies, but its no use. When Marty "dies" off-screen and there is an earthquake after they pull his sacrifice lever. Later, we learn why- Marty isn't dead and the gods are voicing their displeasure.

After Curt and Holden die, Marty shows up to save Dana from daddy Buckner. Turns out that he found a tunnel leading to the building where the control room is located when he was hiding from the zombies. He takes Dana with him into the elevator, where they make their descent into hell. Well, not literal hell, but movie monster hell. All the monsters they were betting on earlier are kept in glass cubes that the elevator can get to, by moving Willy Wonka style (up, down, left, right, forwards and backwards).

To get their revenge on the people that set them up to die horribly, Dana and Marty unleash the monsters and the goriest, funniest, blood-bath I have ever seen takes place. By the time the monsters are done eating people, the hallway is literally slathered in blood. There are so many homages to the different types of movie monsters, you really need to keep your eyes peeled during this sequence to catch them all.

My favorite was Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain- the Pinhead analog of the movie, who held a puzzle sphere instead of a puzzle box. 

I guess he would be called Sawhead instead of Pinhead....

The guest star appearance at the end with Sigourney Weaver playing the Director is also equally awesome. I won't tell you what she does, you'll just have to see it for yourself. Needless to say, she doesn't win. Then, after defeating the Director, Marty and Dana sit down and have one last smoke as the world ends.

If you haven't had a chance to see this movie, you really should. It's an intelligent comment on horror movie cliches and stereotypes. It gives us a reason for why they exist, and why monsters in horror movies are always running after young adults and trying to kill them.

Lovely Molly: 13 Years after The Blair Witch Project

This July 30th year marks the 13th Anniversary of The Blair Witch Project. "The Blair Witch Project" co-director Eduardo Sanchez has once again brought us a movie and sets the stage by creating a mockumentary about the movie to set the mood for his horror film.

Back in 1999, the week prior to its release to a limited number of small theaters across the country, Sci-Fi channel (now SyFy) played a fake documentary or mockumentary about three college students and their grisly demise titled "Curse of the Blair Witch".  "The Blair Witch Project" spawned another mockumentary, "The Burkittsville 7" which aired after the premiere showing of "The Blair Witch Project" in October 2000 on the cable TV channel Showtime. "The Burkittsville 7" expanded upon the myths of the Blair Witch and is a companion piece to "The Blair Witch Project."

Say what you will about the slow pace of "The Blair Witch Project," that movie still managed to get under my skin when I first saw it. And that's because the set up to the big scare at the end was ingenious. Back then, there was no such thing as viral marketing or viral Internet videos for that matter. "The Blair Witch Project" was a small independent horror film that convinced the audience that it was real by airing a documentary highlighting the mystery around the events that take place in the movie right around the time that the movie began to show in selected theaters. They even made a website, The Legacy , to promote the "true story" of the events that took place in "The Blair Witch Project"; which was a cutting edge idea at the time.

The appearance of the website and a documentary touting the movie to be a true story kept people guessing and vacillating between believing that it is real and wondering if it's all made up.  It's this indecision in the audience that enabled the movie to be so scary, and it's what made "The Blair Witch Project" such a huge success.

In fact, "The Blair Witch Project" had such a profound influence on movie making that it coined the phrase "found footage film." Just look at the poster for the movie, it clearly says it in the last sentence, "A year later their footage was found." That phrase is a part of the text that shows at the beginning of the film. Prior to "The Blair Witch Project," these types of movies, starting with "Cannibal Holocaust", were called mockumentaries by film critics. Now, they are called found footage films. There. Now you know some movie history. Pretty neat huh?

Unfortunately, the wild success of the independent film caused Sanchez's next film "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" to be considered a huge let-down for the fans and an office box failure. Which surprised me, as it happens to be one of my favorite movies. At any rate, the second Blair Witch movie didn't make as much money as the first, and the third planned installment of the franchise was cancelled. Since then Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick left the Blair Witch behind them.

13 years later, Sanchez is back, this time with the new psychological horror film "Lovely Molly."  From what I've seen of the trailers so far, the movie seems to be a mix of traditional cinematography and hand-held found footage film style-- which harkens back to Sanchez's Blair Witch days.

Even better, they just released a two part mockumentary called "Lovely Molly: Path to Madness" that talks about the main character Molly Reynold's dark past and how she descends into utter madness. This two part series reminds me of how "The Blair Witch Project" was promoted in the first place, and it really has my curiosity piqued.


If this two part mockumentary is any indication to how much of a terrifying head trip "Lovely Molly" is going to be, I'm getting in line for tickets tomorrow. It's been quite a while since I've seen a really good, get under your skin, so scary you bite your nails off, psychological horror movie. The last one was "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," which for some reason, a lot of reviewers absolutely hated and I adored- mainly because  it was rated R for its psychological horror aspects and not for its gory violence, nudity or bad language. I hope that "Lovely Molly" brings that special kind of horror back to the theaters, as it really is an art form to create a such suspenseful and terrifying movie.

Top 6 Zombie Movie Cliches We Could Do Without

A cliche, like the monster that will just not die, is an idea or expression that has been so overused that it has lost its strength of emotional impact. A cliche can also be a character stereotype whose actions are predictable and superficial in nature. The zombie horror movie genre is chock full of animated rotting corpses, and with any over-saturated market, it has developed its own cliches that, like the zombie itself,  really needs to be shot and put out of its misery.



6. Do You Smell That? 
People in zombie apocalypses have no sense of smell  This one most horror movies are guilty of, but I find it particularly striking for it to occur in zombie movies and zombie TV shows. I know that audiences cannot smell things that are on-screen, but they certainly should be able to at least empathize when a character comes across something that smells utterly disgusting and reacts to it on camera.

To make my point here, I'm going to get a little gross. If you are squeamish, you might not want to read this part.

Ever dump meat in the garbage, like a piece of grisly fatty steak that the garbage disposal unit just won't grind up and get rid of and leave it for a few days and forget about it, only to come home to a really rank smell omitting from the garbage bin? That smell is only from a very small piece of meat that is rotting. Now, take that disgusting smell and multiply it by 100 and imagine what a rotting human body would smell like. Add to that the fact that the bowels will excrete everything they contain upon death when sphincter and bladder muscles relax and you have a zombie that is a walking, reeking cess pool that is harboring life threatening bacteria.

Pretty darn gross, isn't it? I bet you'd smell that coming towards from a mile away, or farther if it's downwind of you.

5. "Social Commentary"

We get it, OK? Modern consumers and/or workers living in a capitalistic society are zombies, slaving away their waking hours to buy what they are "told" they want and/or need and scrambling to get the Next Best Thing at the cost of their own immortal souls.

Yes, people tend to exhibit herd behavior. We're hardwired to do so, it's a product of evolution and a part of our inborn instincts. But, does that mean that we all need to do the same storyline and cover the same themes over and over again? No. It certainly does not.

Zombie movies should not take place in a mall or have the main focus be on  "Gee, money isn't worth diddly squat anymore!" because that setting and the theme has been overdone for far too long.

I propose that every time a zombie movie that uses a variant of the "We're them and they're us" line, takes place in a mall, or talks about how quickly money devalues when the world ends, a little puppy dies. (Not that I condone the killing of cute innocent puppies, but it might be the only way to get movie script writers and directors from using those stupid, insipid cliches. No, seriously. Don't go killing puppies. It's a joke.)

4. Zombie Movie Character Cliches

Most of these are unbelievable character behaviors or ones that have been covered by the majority of zombie movies on the market and need to be put to rest.

• Joe Schmoe gets bit by zombie during an attack and hides it from everyone. Unfortunately, he dies from the festering human bite wound and turns into a zombie and attacks his friends/family when he's needed the most.
• People arguing over killing a loved one who is a zombie.                                                      "No, don't kill Molly! She's our only child!"                                                                                                   "Don't you get it? She's already dead! Move aside, I'll put her out of her misery!"                      "Noooooo!" and so on until the zombie child kills the person arguing to keep her "alive."
• Joe shooting a zombie in the body (as this usually will drop a living person if not outright kill them) over and over to prove a point that the zombie is dead. Most of the time while screaming, "Is it dead? Is it? Huh? Tell me!" 
• Perfect head shot, every time. Everyone, no matter their background or lack of gun training can shoot a zombie in the head in any situation you can think of; while running or jumping over an obstacle, firing out of a window of a speeding vehicle, when they are clearly out of range etc. Believe it or not, most people are psychologically unable to shoot other people in the face.
• Stating rules about zombie survival and in the very next scene disregarding all of them. Ahem, "Zombie Apocalypse" anyone?

3. Overly Strong Yet Badly Decomposed Bodies
Now, unless there's reason for the zombie to be incredibly strong and dangerous, such as the T-virus mutation from "Resident Evil" that causes people to turn into Tyrants, or it is scientifically proven (according to the fictional setting) that zombie's jaw muscles become more defined and thickened, along with the other muscles in their bodies upon reanimation, such as in the animates in the tabletop Neo-Victorian steam punk horror RPG "Unhallowed Metropolis", the rotting decomposing flesh of a zombie would not and should not be stronger than the average person. At the very least, it should not be ten times stronger than it was when it was alive. They aren't ants for crying out loud. They're human zombies. Zombie ants are an entirely different, non-fictional, naturally occurring phenomenon caused by a parasitic fungus species Cordycepts.

While it is common consensus that zombies of any kind cannot feel physical pain, it is highly unbelievable that they would be stronger than the average living, breathing human being. Unless the zombie is magic, or caused by super evil science, there is no way that a rotting corpse can possibly be stronger. Yeah, I'm talking to you "The Walking Dead." Dale would be stronger than the scrawny swamp walker that killed him with its super-sharp nails and vice-grip-like finger strength. Human nails and hair do not keep growing after death. They just appear to, because the skin dries out and shrinks, pulling back from the finger nail beds and hair follicles. Zombie nails growing and becoming sharper just would not happen. Sorry guys...

While I'm on the subject, a living person would have quite the chore ahead of himself if he were to claw apart a person's abdomen with his bare hands, so it's reasonable to believe that an undead person would have a bit of work to do before he could reach the juicy internal organs. There's all that skin, fat, sinew, muscle, etc to get through before the intestines. If our intestines and stomach were as close to the surface of our skin that a single scratch and pull of flesh would expose them, we'd all be screwed. Or eternally suffering from hernias...

2. Stealth Zombies

Yes, I did begin to cover this under number six, but I wish to expand the idea here because it's idiotic for every single character in every zombie movie to not only have no sense of smell, but for them to be partially, if not mostly deaf. These characters lack two crucial senses that most people would be able to use in real life: that of the sense of smell and hearing.

Imagine this Scenario:

Joe and Mark are standing around, each smoking a cigarette while on night watch. They've run out of things to talk about and are just nervously glancing around, looking for any potential threat to the camp, which is at least a mile away from where they are on guard.

It's dead quiet outside. Not even the birds or crickets are chirping. There is no wind, nothing. Just the sound of the men exhaling and inhaling as they smoke. Suddenly a silhouette appears behind Joe and grabs his shoulders! Mark looks at him, dumbfounded, while Joe is attacked and killed by the deadliest of zombie cliches: the stealth zombie.

Now let's look at this Scenario again. This time, with feeling! (i.e. all of our senses):

Joe and Mark are standing around, each smoking a cigarette while on night watch. They've run out of things to say and are nervously glancing about, looking for any oncoming zombies that may be heading towards their encampment, which is a mile away from where they are on guard.

The night birds and crickets suddenly stop chirping. The night grows eerily still as the slight cool spring breeze dies off.

A soft, slow shuffling can be heard in the distance.
"Do you smell that?" Joe asks.
"Yeah," Mark says and drops his to the ground and snuffs it out with his foot. "Smells like the dead."
Joe tosses his smoke and picks up his trusty shovel.
Mark looks around with his night vision binoculars and points down the street behind them. "There."
"Do you think it spotted us?"
"Doubt it."
"I'll head around behind it and take it out while you distract it." Joe says.
"What?"
"Come on! I distracted the last one! It's only fair."
"Fine."

Mark jogs towards the zombie and begins to shout. The zombie's head lifts up and it starts shuffling his way while Joe runs around the block to get up behind it. Once he approaches, he speeds up and rams into its back, making it fall face-first into the pavement. With a wordless cry, Joe raises the shovel and smashes its down onto the zombie's rotting soft head, caving it in, successfully stopping the zombie before it can even turn around to attack him.

Stealth zombies are so obnoxious and annoying, they need to be stopped. A slow zombie would shamble and shuffle towards its prey, stumbling loudly over obstacles, knocking things down, feet snapping twigs, slamming unlocked doors open, running into tables, chairs, doors and so on. A fast zombie would be running at top speed, often screaming or yelling at the top of its lungs as it barrels towards its prey. It would stumble, knock things over, slam into things, break stuff left and right, and make a heck of a lot of noise. Either way, neither zombie type would have stealth capabilities, and even if they could, you would still be able to smell them once they get close enough that you'd know that something was coming to eat you. So cut it out already movie makers. The stealth zombie attack is old and utterly unrealistic.

1. The Army is Evil
This cliche is particularly annoying because it is such an overused zombie movie theme. The biggest culprits of spreading this cliche are Romero's "Day of the Dead," "Survival of the Dead,"  "28 Days Later" and "28 Weeks Later."  In zombie movies, army guys either want to rape your women, steal your stuff or put you under martial law (which probably would happen during an apocalyptic zombie outbreak). According to George Romero and Danny Boyle, all soldiers are sociopathic, unsympathetic jerks who could care less about what happens to people; all they want is to be in charge.

There is a difference between living through harrowing times, such as a zombie apocalypse and being affected by it, and just simply being a jerk wad. I find it hard to believe that EVERY SINGLE soldier in the world is a total douche bag. Most are normal guys and gals that care about people and their country.

Fortunately, most soldier characters in zombie movies would not be allowed in the U.S. Army. Why? Because the army requires that you pass a psychological profile test before they'll even accept you into boot camp. It does not accept those who are over-eager to kill, have an aversion towards obeying orders and those who chafe under authority figures, which covers pretty much most of the types of characters that are in the army in zombie movies.

I'm really tired of the whole army is evil theme. It's trite and insulting to the brave men and women who actually are in the armed forces. Either the army would utterly fall apart under the zombie apocalypse, or it would keep men together who have bonded in combat and managed to stay alive because they care for one another like family.

These six commonly reoccurring cliches in zombie movies, TV shows and even novels are so ignorant and obnoxious that anyone who uses them should be slapped, or at the very least, called a lazy idiot for not researching the facts and imitating the mistakes of others that have come before him.

Six Things that make Silent Hill so Wonderfully Scary

"Silent Hill" came out in 1999 and since then the franchise has spawned four games that were true to it's core themes and way too many that aren't. The last three to come out, "Silent Hill: Homecoming," "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories" and "Silent Hill: Downpour" pale in comparison to the original three installments. It's like the game developers read the really, really crappy Silent Hill comics they put out and decided that they were so brilliant that they just had to imitate them.

For instance:

"Silent Hill: Paint it Black" is a trade paperback about an angst ridden artist is sucked into Silent Hill. He comes across a school bus full of cheerleader commandos. I'm not kidding. Here's page 27. Cheryl, head of the cheerleaders knows Seven Schools of Hand-to-hand Combat. And, she has a baseball bat.

So... Yeah.... That's as good as that comic gets. None of the Silent Hill comics have ever really been able to capture the essence of Silent Hill. None that I've read at least.

So, what then, is at the heart of Silent Hill that the current installments in the franchise lack? What is missing? What is the one thing that game developers keep getting wrong?

Well, it isn't just one thing, but six things that are really at the heart of Silent Hill and the Survival Horror genre. And it's these six things that make these video games so scary and so great.

1. The Everyman Character
Silent Hill for PlayStation introduced us to Harry Mason. He's looking for his daughter. Have you seen her?

What made "Silent Hill" so scary was the fact that the characters were average, every day people. Harry was a normal guy looking for his lost daughter. That is what the game is about: a loving father's desperate search for his child.

Harry isn't a highly trained muscle bound commando. He's an average skinny guy who is so clumsy at times that he can trip down stairs. It's his frailty that not only adds to the overall feel of Survival Horror, it makes him a character that anyone can relate to, which in turn makes the game play experience all the more terrifying.

"Silent Hill 2" gave us James Sunderland, a poor bastard that "lost" his wife to a disease and then received a letter from her telling him that she's waiting for him in Silent Hill.

Clues throughout the game lead up the final reveal that James killed his wife to put her out of her misery and to end his own suffering at having to watch the one woman he loved waste away to nothing. His feelings of guilt over his incompetency and his  deeply repressed sexual desires are represented throughout the game, with the overtly sexual manikins, Pyramid Head and the presence of Maria. James was not a soldier. He was just a grieving husband whose guilt over his wife's death drove insane. And his insanity dragged him into Silent Hill.

In "Silent Hill 3," we have Heather Mason- Harry Mason's adopted daughter. He rescued her from the ashes of the final fight in "Silent Hill."

She is a teenage girl who slowly learns the mystery behind her birth and who and what she really is, all the while being terrorized by monsters formed by her own psyche.

Heck, even "Silent Hill 4" is about an agoraphobic shut-in. Then, we get "Silent Hill: Homecoming," in which the reigns were handed completely over to an American gaming team. And it shows.

The focus on combat at the sake of everything else utterly ruined the game experience for me. Of course, so does the direct from the movie to the video game import of the sexy demon nurse and Pyramid Head. The nurses are freaking fast and will stab you to death faster than you can even get a knife up to parry them. Arrrrrgg!!

2. Less Ammo, More Running
Monsters aren't scary if you have an unlimited supply of ammo and really powerful guns. Makeshift weapons, such as rusty pipes, wooden planks with nails in them, etc. do make things a bit more dangerous when you decide to engage in combat. ("Silent Hill: Origins" did not have a lot of guns, but the weapons degraded with each hit and eventually broke. It was annoying and did not improve the game play experience, but detracted from of it.) The whole idea of Survival Horror is that you have to struggle to survive the monsters the game throws at you. Limited ammo makes every encounter a fight or flight experience- which combined with our natural instincts to run or fight when we encounter danger makes Survival Horror all the more terrifying to play.

With the option of running away thrown out the window and being stuck with having to fight unavoidable monsters-- not bosses-- just monsters like the Needler monster in the Grand Hotel in "Silent Hill: Homecoming" where all you could do is parry it's scythe arm attacks with a knife and not hit it for the life of you. There are also those that you cannot, in any way run away from, such as the Lurkers that would continue to come after you and will chase you all the way to Alex's house and wait for you to exit to attack en mass. When the choice of fighting or running is ripped away from you and you are forced to fight everything you come across, the Survival Horror experience turns into a frustrating gaming nightmare that totally kills the feeling of foreboding dread that the original three Silent Hill games so brilliantly cultivated.

3. Sound, visuals, and Story work in Tandem to scare the living BEEP out of you.

"One unique innovation to the game play of Silent Hill is the use of sound. Music changes to create tension as you explore, but even cooler than that is how you will hear enemies before you actually see them.... On top of that, the [radio] sound is in stereo, so by rotating in place you can narrow down the direction and number of baddies before you can see them or they see you." Page 26- Totally Unauthorized Silent Hill Strategy Guide by Brady Games.

It's very rare when a game maker can use all three elements of sight, sound and story to conjure up such feelings of dread and uncertainty. So we have non-traditional auditory cues to alert us to the presence of monsters, music that starts up in the presence of other monsters or in certain areas to create this utter sense of foreboding and an overall soundtrack that did not rely on any of the Western traditions of horror music; such as the often over-used and now cliched violin trill.

The visual style of Silent Hill is two-fold. There is the day time style with dilapidated run-down buildings and an oppressive looming fog that threatens to consume you while hiding unspeakable horrors that are lurking in your midst.

Then there is the night time style, with the pitch black darkness, rusted metal chain link fences and steel doors, and more grotesque scenes of carnage with mangled corpses hanging from walls or bound up in an almost fetishistic manner and locked in rusted metal cages.

Overall, the story line of the first three games tackles the idea of a cult living in a town that existed outside of reality, and yet, at the same time, existed right along side it, which leads me to number four on my list.


4. Personal Hell in a Parasite Reality
Silent Hill exists in our world and in the Otherworld (or Otherside or Nightmare realm or whatever you want to call it.). Silent Hill straddles the Veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead. It subsumes other towns and will continue to creep out over the land, swallowing more places and people as it goes. It does not have a reality or its own plane of existence, but rather, sucks life from our own, which is why it is a parasite reality. Silent Hill also appears to have a consciousness as well, which makes me wonder if the parasite reality itself isn't some sort of huge demon.

The psyche of each individual that enters Silent Hill affects the shape and feel of the town and its monsters. A person's fears, anxieties and traumatic past warps the Parasite Reality into something nightmarish and evil. It feeds on fear and pain and blood. It wants you to be scared, even more than it wants you to die. When one or more people are there at the same time, the monsters created from their subconscious minds can clash- with the strongest being the one that was made by the strongest fear from an individual.

The first three installments of the Silent Hill franchise also had unique monsters. "Silent Hill" had monsters that were influenced by Cheryl's subconscious mind. There were evil demon children that represented the kids at school that tormented her and there were monsters based on insects, such as huge months, dogs and other critters. Even though you play as Harry, the monsters weren't created from his psyche, probably because he was emotionally stable and a normal guy.

"Silent Hill 2" had strange grotesque, yet oddly sexual monsters that were drawn from James' subconscious mind. Pyramid Head wielded either a huge sword or a spear and was a direct result of his primal male urge to procreate, which was demonstrated in the now infamous mannikin rape scene.

My oh my! Look at the time!

"Silent Hill 3" started to deviate from the idea of having protean monsters that were shaped by people's fears and obsessions in that the monsters really didn't represent much of anything as they were far too abstract. The creator's reasoning for some of the more stranger creatures being aspects of Heather's repressed fears and obsessions weren't very convincing either.

Speaking of personal monsters, if the character does not have repressed sexual urges, keep Pyramid Head out of the game. If a character does not have a traumatic hospital experience, keep the "sexy" demon nurses out of the game.

You don't see Maria showing up in any other game. She's also a product of James' repressed sexuality. Why doesn't she also appear in other Silent Hill games? She is made by the same thing that created Pyramid Head.

The reason why he shows up so much is because Pyramid Head is a fan favorite that has taken over our collective imagination. Personally, I think the strange demonic entity is cool as hell and loved it when he appeared in the Silent Hill movie (in that case, it was explained that he was a manifestation of Alessa's hatred, or some theorize, a demonic avatar and enforcer of Silent Hill itself). But, honestly, he doesn't belong in any other game because James isn't there. The only way I could accept it is if James makes an appearance in another Silent Hill game, then the appearance of his personal demons would make sense.

It's as simple as that. Silent Hill is shaped by our Shadow- all of the negative stuff in our subconscious mind. If a character does not have these traits lurking in the back of her mind,  Pyramid Head and sexy demon nurses do not belong in the game.


5. J-Horror Themes
Vengeful Ghost
In Japanese Horror, a person who suffers greatly becomes a vengeful hungry ghost who holds a grudge against the living. It cannot be placated, it just wants living people to suffer and die. There is also a theme of psychic projection in a lot of Japanese horror and anime where a comatose patient can send an avatar of themselves out into reality to interact with living people and objects as if they are really physically there. Creepy.

In "Silent Hill," that is what Alessa became. Cheryl was an avatar of Alessa, a projection of her desires to live a normal life. When Alessa could no longer escape the truth, Cheryl was brought back to Silent Hill. She influenced Harry, and he took her there.

Ghost in the Machine
In Japanese folk beliefs, ghosts can manipulate electronic devices. They can mess with the lights, your TV, your radio, your computer and so on. A classic example of this is "The Ring." Samara could curse VHS tapes. She always knew when they were being played and could see who was watching them because they were an extension of her existence. This is also why she could crawl out of the well and then directly through the TV screen and into the room where her victims are sitting, watching in abject horror as she walks towards them. Ghosts are literally in our machines.

Silent Hill Radio Interference
In J-horror, ghosts are believed to be able to manipulate computers and electronic devices. That is why there is so much radio interference when the monsters of Silent Hill get close to a radio, or a person that is carrying a radio, such as the main character of the game.

6. The FOG
One of the things that makes the original three installations of Silent Hill so creepy are the figures and silhouettes lurking in the fog. While it was originally done in Silent Hill for PSX because of limitations in the gaming console that caused a short "draw" distance (how far ahead the scenery could be produced by the gaming computer while you ran or walked), it was kept because it's creepy as hell.

I can assure you, if you ever get the chance to walk in a thick fog, you will spot figures that you can't quite make out. This is what makes it so scary, because you can't really see what's out there. The monsters are literally hidden from you and their shapes are only hinted at in the dense foggy streets. Removing the fog, or lightening it up to reveal more of the streets, as what happened with the glitchy Silent Hill 2 in the HD Collection ruins the mood of the game and makes it less scary.

If game creators in the future could manage to just hit these six things when they make another Silent Hill game, they'll put the heart right back into that creepy looming monstrosity and give us a true Survivor Horror game play experience.

The Worst Zombie Movies Ever Made

There are plenty of lists out there about zombie movies. This one is about the worst zombie movies ever made. And while there were a lot of contenders, these four are the worst of the lot: "Survival of the Dead", "Zombie Apocalypse," "Steve Niles' Remains" and "Deadlands: The Rising."



Survival of the Dead (2009)

Synopsis from Magnet Releasing:

The newest film from horror master George A. Romero (legendary creator of the Night of the Living Dead franchise) picks up where Diary of the Dead leaves off. On a small island off the coast of Delaware, live two families locked in a struggle for power and control over the fate of the undead. The O’Flynns approach the zombie plague with a shoot-to-kill attitude. The Muldoons feel that the zombies should be quarantined and kept “alive,” in hopes that a solution will be discovered. For both families, existence on Plum Island is a nightmarish world where humans are the minority and zombies rule.

"Survival of the Dead" is the worst zombie movie Romero has ever done. Period.  Anyone who says otherwise is suffering from Romero Fan-Boy Wank Syndrome: No matter what it is, if Romero makes it and there's zombies in it, the movie is absolute gold!

Ha! "Survival of the Dead" is drowning in trite cliches and not a single character in the movie has any sort of redeeming quality about them. Not only are all of the characters unsympathetic jerks, they are stuck in a bad retelling of the Hatfields and the McCoys on Little Ireland er, I mean, Plum Island in North America off the coast of Delaware. Delaware? Seriously?

One faction of Little Ireland, the O'Flynn clan, wants to dispose of the zombies and put them out of their undead misery. (I'm on the O'Flynn's side on the matter, but that's just me.) The other faction, the Muldoon clan, wants to "train" them and use them for menial labor. Muldoon even has tethered a "mailman" zombie to a mailbox. It walks away, is yanked back on the tether and then returns to the mailbox to "deliver" a letter. The idiots firmly believe that zombies are safe to be around and that they can be taught, which results in having a "herd" of zombies stored in a corral on the Muldoon clan farm. This idea that zombies can be useful began in the Romero zombie franchise with "Day of the Dead."

In "Day of the Dead" Romero posited the idea: What if rotting zombie brains could retain some intelligence, however animalistic it is? What would happen if they could remember things or events from when they were alive?

It's an interesting idea, one that was handled quite well by Kim Paffenroth's novel "Dying to Live." Unfortunately, neither "Land of the Dead" nor "Survival of the Dead" managed to pull it off with any sort of dignity.

"Survival of the Dead" takes the idea presented with Beethoven loving Bub the zombie in "Day of the Dead" and Big Daddy aka zombie Moses in "Land of the Dead" and runs with it in circles while holding a razor sharp pair of scissors to give us horse riding zombie Jane.

Horse riding "smart zombie" Jane O'Flynn in "Survival of the Dead" is the undead twin sister of Janet O'Flynn. Smart zombie Jane rides a horse all over the place on Little Ireland. Yeah. You read that right. The zombie is riding a living, breathing animal and the horse for some strange reason, has absolutely no problem with being ridden by a dead thing that is still moving.

Oh sure, you can train a horse to do a lot of things, but get it to allow a rotting animated corpse on its back? You have to be freaking kidding me. Horses are not that dumb. It is highly unlikely that a horse would let anything that smells like a rotting cess pool and looks like it just crawled up out of its grave anywhere near it.


Which brings us to one of my main problems with "Survival of the Dead." The zombies are not treated like a threat. They are taunted and played with like it's happy fun time in the zombie apocalypse. When they are not being played with, the zombies are somehow able to teleport behind people, or like ninja undead, slip between a whole squad of soldiers (as in the beginning of the movie) and attack a poor man while his dumbfounded buddies just stand there and watch. They don't take even kill it until after their buddy is dead.

One remarkable idiotic zombie death takes place on a fishing boat. One of the soldiers picks up a fire extinguisher, gets the zombie's attention with it and then gets it to bite it, kind of like you would when teasing a dog (well if you are that kind of a jerk...). The zombie then has its eyes and brain blown out of its head when the fire extinguisher goes off. (Which apparently was also done by a soldier in "Day of the Dead.")

By the time I got to the end of the movie, I was wishing that someone would blow out my eyes out too, just to put me out of my misery. Don't bother with this one. It's terrible.


SyFy's Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Synopsis from IMDB:
Months after a zombie plague has wiped out 90 percent of the American population, a small group of survivors fight their way cross-country to a rumored refuge on the island of Catalina.


Please, please SyFy, just stop. Stop making movies that rely on CG-- it's obvious you can't afford a computer effects studio that can actually make the animation look believable. And while you're at it, just stop producing movies all together. 


"Zombie Apocalypse" is another bad SYFY movie with terrible two dimensional weightless computer graphics, this time with "magic katana" karate-chop action! Awesome chick with katana Cassie is so amazing that her katana blade doesn't even get remotely close to a zombie when swings it, and yet, WOOSH! Off with their heads! It's kind of like watching one of those Samurai magic sword attacks in anime where they just swing it and the force of the blade flinging through the air is so strong that it knocks down buildings. Except this movie was supposed to be about normal average every day people trying to survive... Sigh.

Just when you think the CG can't get any worse, they encounter a weightless zombie tiger on the pier.
I guess it wanted to go fishing...?  

SyFy's "Zombie Apocalypse" has such unbelievable character actions that even the intro is dumb.

Who decided it would be a good idea to set off global wide EMPs to cut off all communication in an attempt to quarantine the zombie virus? I mean, it's not a high-tech zombie virus caused by nanites infecting the tissue of dead human beings and reanimating them. So how exactly would cutting off communications stop it from spreading? Blowing up bridges, cutting off fuel supplies, military enforcement of quarantine zones, that would help, for a while at least. But, ruining electronic devices? Come on!

Taryn Manning who plays Ramona, the main character and stereotypical dumb blonde, sounds like she has one hell of a head cold throughout the whole movie. The best I can compare it to is the voice of Lindsay Lohan in the Robot Chicken episode "Highlohander." Not only does she sound just like her, Ramona is just as stupid as the Lohan parody as well.

Yes. That is an actual line from the movie. And it's as intelligent and articulate as the movie's heroine gets, or anyone else in "Zombie Apocalypse" for that matter.

These characters are so dumb, they'd have to stop and ask the zombies for directions to Catalina.

The heavy reliance on sub-par computer graphics for animated special effects and the terrible dialog in "Zombie Apocalypse" would only work if we were living in the Bizarro universe of "Idiocracy." Then it might, and that's a big MIGHT, be funny. But scary? Hell no. The only thing scary about this movie is that someone paid money to get it produced. Don't even bother renting it, or watching it if it ever appears on TV again. You'll lose SAN points if you do.

Steve Niles' Remains (2011)

IMDB Synopsis:
The story centers on two lone survivors of a bizarre accident that reduced most of the world's population to zombies. They take refuge in a vacant casino and fight a losing battle against the undead.

"Steve Niles' Remains" by Chiller is another zombie movie that gets a ton of really, really good gushing praise from reviewers and for the life of me, I can't figure out why, other than the fact that "It's got zombies in it. Hur Durr..."

The zombies in "Remains" are so dumb, they eat their own arms.

It's a damn shame that the acting and overall attention to detail in the short film that leads up to the start of the movie in "Remains: Road to Reno" wasn't held up as an example of production value for the actual freaking movie. Talk about a disappointment. I couldn't even get through the first half hour of the damn thing. It was absolute eye-rolling stupidity.

None of the characters acted like a real person would and the entire thing suffers from Idiot Plot Syndrome. As in, if real thinking people were in the same situations, they would never do any of the things that the characters in this movie did.

What's worse is that the character creator and writer of the comic that the movie was based on, Steve Niles, admits in an interview with Yahoo! Movies that his characters are in fact, idiotic douche bags. "[Tom] is kind of a dumb ass. He's not the brightest guy in the world. Tori isn't the nicest person in the world."

So, his two main characters are an idiot and a mean, shallow chick that works in a casino? Great. At least the zombies didn't talk in the movie, like they do in the comic book and say things like "Need flesh!" But that's the only thing "Remains" does right.

Hey guys, I know there's zombies loose in the hotel, but I'm going to split up and go off on my own anyways...  


Deadlands: The Rising (2006)

Synopsis from IMDB:
October 2008. A biochemical weapon explosion causes a freak chain of events and brings the dead back to life. It is up to five people to make a stand for survival against an ever growing army of the Living Dead.

Remember, "Deadlands: The Rising" has nothing to do with the Pinnacle tabletop RPG "Deadlands." I know because the intro to the movie tells us and it was on the box when I rented it from the video store.

At first when I was looking for info on the Internet about this movie, I didn't believe that it was the same thing. The synopsis has absolutely NOTHING in common with the actual movie that was put out.

So, what's "Deadlands: The Rising" about? Nothing. Seriously. It's about nothing. There is no plot. More than half of the movie is either A. Michelle writing in her "journal" about events that already happened with her narrating as she writes (Yeah. That got old real quick) or B. Gary and/or Brian whining and doing nothing at all.

Most of  "Deadlands: The Rising" is just filler. It lingers on events that are of absolute no consequence and are boring as hell. There is a scene that takes over a half an hour where Gary and Brian shoot at cans. I'm not kidding. Shooting at cans and improvising boring dialog. For over 30 minutes of the film.

Oh, and there's a scene with a dog in a closet. And one scene where Gary or Brian (because seriously, after a while I stopped caring about who was whom) is stuck in a "traffic jam" at night and zombies come out of the darkness and attack people in cars. Gee. If only they managed to just lock their damned car doors. Then none of that would've happened.

Yeah. "Deadlands: The Rising" makes "Zombie Apocalypse" seem like a decent movie. And that's sad, because it sucks.