Final Destination meets Saved By the Bell...

Sounds like a bad Hollywood pitch, but it turns out to be a VERY entertaining music video...

Review: Cold Prey (2006)

Despite having a somewhat neurotic fear-based personality, I can name a great many things that have never scared me – furry kittens, the letter J, neck fuzz, Liberal agendas, Trapper Keepers, Norwegians…

Yes, Norwegians. With one of the highest human development index rankings in the world, Norwegians are born entitled to government healthcare, free college tuition and oral sex on demand. It is the Miss Naughty Niceypants of countries. Even tolerant Socialist slut Sweden has been known to occasionally reach over, grab Norway by the ankles and give it a swirly.

So when the illustrious Stacie Ponder over at Final Girl assigned her fellow horror bloggers the Norwegian horror film Cold Prey to review for her Film Club, I  had expectations as low as the Norwegian  wind chill factor. 

Because Norwegians aren’t scary. Need proof? Consider Norwegian rap music….

Now stop considering it entirely. Now look at their athletes…



And last but definitely least, consider their most lasting contribution to Rock and Roll… a-ha…



I'm sorry, but no primal emotion can be evoked by a man in high-wasted Mom jeans with a gay-porn-power-bottom-over-the-shoulder-come-hither-stare. (I am also quite certain that this picture must be used somewhere for denim-aversion therapy.)

So Norway - not scary, not sexy. Charming, sweet, safe, perhaps a bit nipple-hardening in the weather department. But nothing from there could possibly disturb the core hypothalamus of my lizard brain.

But, would Cold Prey change my mind? Would this little plucky slasher movie have me trembling in fear at the sight of a masked Norwegian madman?

Cold Prey opens with a young boy being chased through the snow. Soon after, we are introduced to our horror movie douchebags. To make things simple, lets call them Horny Couple, Sensible Couple, and Annoying Understandably Single Redhead Geek.

I'm not a betting man, but if I was I would have placed my marker on the female half of Sensible Couple to be the survivor. She has that not-too-sexy, but hey-I’m-not-a-Lesbian way about her that just screams Final Girl.



The Remote Place Where The Douchebags Will Get Slaughtered is an abandoned ski lodge. Once there, all of the slasher movie rules will be adhered to as if The Great Santini was hovering over the director and ordering a drop-and-gimme-20 every time he strayed.

Yes, the slut will be slaughtered first, weapons will be ignored or dropped, guns will run out of bullets at the worst time, the killer will keep walls of newspaper clippings to make it easy for our survivors to figure out his identity, and victims will cower inside of small spaces instead of mounting a likely successful joint assault on the killer.  And by killer, I mean this guy…



Yes, we are meant to believe that 5 able bodied extreme sports enthusiasts are unable to take this cuddly fella who looks like either an extra from the pre-CGI cantina scene in Star Wars or the loneliest furry at the convention. Maybe he just needs a friend…



Horror movies are made or broken on two criteria for me: (1) Do I care about the people who are in danger and (2) Has my disbelief been suspended to the extent that I actually believe they are in danger?

Unfortunately, Cold Prey failed on both fronts for me. It’s not a badly constructed low budget horror movie, I guess. It’s just nothing special.

And though Cold Prey did nothing to instill the scareds in me, a seed of Norwegia-phobia may have been inadvertantly sparked by this guy...

Norwegian on Ecstacy is truly the fertile womb from which nightmares are born.

Let's all go to the snack bar...

I am a bigtime Drive-In fetishist, so this wacky little piece of disturb-ishness really buttered my popcorn this morning.... Enjoy...

MK12 | Follow the Sun | 2011 from MK12 on Vimeo.

How Scream Should Have Ended....

Review Haiku: Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Staring into the plot ... er ... rabbit hole.

If the Red Queen yelled

'Off with her head!' one more time,

I'd have cut off mine.

Reviews: Red Riding Hood (2011)

What, like, big teeth you have...

When I heard that Orphan scripter David Leslie Johnson wrote an update of the Red Riding Hood legend, I peed just a little bit.

Sucking my pee back into my peehole was word that it would be directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Though she burst onto the scene with the awesome raw, kinetic teen-hormone horror of Thirteen, her version of Twilight was twee, phony, pablum.  

What happened? I mean, Thirteen would totally flip off Twilight, then chuck an empty beer bottle at its head while sucking a whippet balloon.

So I wondered to myself if Catherine would reclaim the mantle of violent, imploding teen girl angst by putting a modern, punk rock spin on a classic legend?  Or would she cover up all the raw dark edges in a shitty Twi-hard sheen that lacked anything resembling a real human emotion? My answer is best described visually....

The original script for Red was a clever, dark take on the legend. Grounded by the idea of the "monster" as the projected unintegrated shadow side of a 14th century European community, the script combined the witch-hunting insanity of The Crucible with the whodunnit aspect of an Agatha Christie story. The script had its weak spots. Red was a little passive and weak for a modern protagonist. Many of the characterizations were one-dimensional. But there were just enough allusions to the town's heart of darkness, that it gave the more silly, plot-driven elements some weight.

Unfortunately, Hardwicke made the choice to double-down on  the weak points of the script, so we are presented with 14th century Europe via the CW. By scrubbing out all the the darker elements that gave a potentially silly and dated story some gravitas, she went and delivered some Twilight-porn.

Redken Molding paste was big in the 1400s

The small town looks straight out of Disneyland. No 14th century disease and suffering here. Everyone is scrubbed clean and moussed within a inch of their lives. Despite werewolf attacks, medieval torture devices, and boiling pots of mealy looking stew, you never once feel transported to anything remotely dangerous or medieval. Everything feels incredibly safe. Then there is the wolf. Dear God, the wolf. The less said about that unscary CGI abomination the better.

In the script, Red's sister Lucie, was an interesting, compelling and conflicted character with incestuous, and perhaps suicidal drives. Clearly that would be too much of a bummer for the tweens, so the movie glosses over one of the most tragic moments of pathos in the script.

I wished Ms. Hardwicke could have made Red more like Thirteen, injecting it with the same throbbing hormonally punk fuck-you energy that powered that micro-budgeted film. I think that would have been a kick in the ass.

Instead, we have this over-produced piece of studio poop, that was hardly pee-worthy. Cathy, I'm sending you my dry cleaning bill!

For some Red Riding Good, go rent Freeway!

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Dirt Devil-The Exorcist from MrPrice2U on Vimeo.