Hatchet II (2010)

When it comes to post-millennial independent horror series, I don't think Adam Green's Hatchet can be beat. It's not just their technical and artistic proficiency, but the spirit behind them. Green, a kid of the slasher reign of the '80s, is one of those rare artists whose creativity is absorbed in childish imagine, bringing equal measure of excellence and adolescent thrill that no good horror fan has ever really grown out of.

In a Friedkin-style sound jump, Hatchet II jumps straight back in where the first left off, with Marybeth (now scream queen Danielle Harris) neck-deep in grimy swamp water at the hands of the still-not-fucking-dead Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). A good old-fashioned thumb to the eyesocket sends him toppling overboard the boat and into the water with her, where she is inexplicably saved by old piss-drinker himself Jack Cracker.

He takes her back to his cabin and serves her a refreshing warm cup of piss (and this is before he realises he hates her!) When Marybeth reveals her recently-deceased pappy was Samson Dunston, old Jack cocks his shotgun and tells her to get the hell off his property, and that if she got any questions as to his sudden reversal of attitude toward her, to take it up with Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd).

She makes it back to town somehow, and drops in on Zombie, who reveals to her that her own beloved pappy was one of the three young hoodlums that threw firecrackers at the Crowley house that fateful Halloween night, and is basically directly responsible for the brick-shithouse of a mutant terrorising Honey Island Swamp. He summons his colleague Justin (the wonderful Parry Shen), who it turns out is the brother of Shaun, the hilarious fool whose illegal and "ONLY haunted swamp tour" *smacks with top hat* was the vehicle of the previous night's massacre - and whaddaya know, the guy is the spitting image of his recently-deceased tourguide brother.

Zombie sends him into town with a list of personnel to call to the shop, claiming if he is going to head out into the swamp, there are certain people he'd rather have there for backup. He also tells Marybeth that if she doesn't bring a relative (knowing full well that both her pappy and brother are dead), he will not agree to take her. So she enlists the reluctant help of Uncle Bob, and we are still not sure just what diabolical scheme is behind Zombie's insistence that her family member comes along for an imminent bloodbath.

Having had a fabulous but underexposed cameo in the first Hatchet, adding a few good points to its ensemble of horror icons, it is great to see Tony Todd take Zombie into a feature-length and central character in this sequel. He brings an interesting secondary villain role to the mix, and plays it sinister and yet oddly charismatic, to the point that we are never certain exactly what he's plotting. And naturally, after all of his scheming, he has wiggled his way to the front of the 'creatively horrible death' queue.

So an hour or so later a big old motley crew descend on the Zombie abode, ranging from beefy grey-bearded bikers with confederate flag patches on their denim waistcoats, to slutty girls, to unattractive redneck sex pests. They are all offered $500 a head to supposedly retrieve Zombie's boat, but he promises $5000 for the head of Crowley. Those who are not instantly scared off by the mention of Crowley swagger off into the swamp with guns a-blazin', certain that they needn't fear a 'children's story'. Famous last words.

The real joy of the Hatchet movies is their youthful vigour, with Adam Green at the helm. Dedicated to old-school effects and a zero-tolerance policy towards CGI, Green's series is characterised by its wickedly creative death scenes and its tongue-in-cheek freshman comedic style. For any good horror fan, it is the ultimately enjoyable combination, that makes for fully-loaded entertainment that allows us to laugh hysterically while marvelling in all the really gruesome FX.

Sweet Hostage (1975)

As Exhibit D in the Linda Blair Victim Files, Sweet Hostage is on a different level to the others. Here, Linda Blair is Doris Mae Withers, and she is by far the spunkiest and most independent of Blair's characters up to that point. While the title conjures up some images of an innocent young girl in a flowing white dress being violated by a slobbering psychopath (and not all of these connotations are unfounded), the extent to which Blair's character is a victim, or even really a hostage, is very minimal indeed, and this is by the will of both the lead characters in this surprisingly moving two-hander.


Linda stars alongside veteran Martin Sheen, whose paternity over several of the Brat Pack is so wonderfully obvious from the offset. It is like Sheen is creating a living, breathing mold for what his son(s) would become, and when I say this, I think, of course, of Charlie. Here, Sheen plays a manically sophisticated escaped mental patient with a penchant for romantic poetry, and a tendency towards the occasional flip-out. He has that sort of omniscient life force about him, an energy and buzz that seems superhuman, in the same league as Jack Nicholson, that makes anything he does simply fascinating to witness.

Blair and Sheen make a remarkably formidable pair. They have such chemistry from their very first encounter, a sort that, despite the great talent of these two actors, surely goes beyond make believe. In the same eerily ever-present way that Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling had such simmering sexual tension in a beauty-beast relationship, this sweet 15-year-old and this eccentric stranger 20 years her senior have a tangible connection that enables their entire story to ease by, under unspoken promise of meaningfulness. As it turns out, Linda Blair later revealed in an interview that she fell in love with Sheen whilst filming.

Doris Mae starts off the film as a young tomboy, living in some rural Southern town, where she chatters with the locals with familiarity, but acts as an exasperated onlooker throughout her parents' frequent conflicts at home. She generally seems her normal happy self when she is away from the farm where she lives. In the opening sequence, we are introduced to Leonard Hatch (Sheen), a gallant fellow who bows and recites poetic stanzas for the ladies. He is also on the run from a not too harsh-looking mental institution, and blends in remarkably well: he seems to be one of those selective psychopaths, who knows when to play it cool, which is why Doris Mae thinks nothing of hitching a ride with him when her truck breaks down.

After a little engaging banter, it becomes evident that Leonard does not plan to drop his new Lady Fair off at the farm. Yet Doris Mae is no victim. She insists on holding the power over her captor. "If you're gonna rape me, just pull over and get it over with!" she demands. But Leonard has no such vulgar intentions. His intentions may be rather unclear, but if anything, he seems more in want of a companion, and perhaps a pupil, to whom he can impart all of the romantic wisdom deemed by the doctors to be illness.

The pair live together in a little abandoned farm, and grow to love each other. It says all you need to know about rural Southern towns in the '70s when the thing that causes authorities to be alarmed to a possible kidnapping is Sheen's character purchasing women's clothes at a store. For whatever reason, the store girl deems this highly suspicious/inappropriate and calls the police, who seem to share her suspicions enough to pursue this women's-clothes-buying deviant. It also says all you need to know that this incident demonstrates more effort to save Doris than her parents ever do. But Doris doesn't need or want saving, and the inevitable fallout of the law's involvement turns the story into a sort of Romeo and Juliet tragedy.

For what some might deem an exploitation picture typical of the mid-'70s TV movie scene, Sweet Hostage is a poignant and touching film that deserves much wider viewing and acclaim than it has ever received. Blair and Sheen carry the movie flawlessly, and seemingly without much need for direction, and make one of the most sweet and unconventional romantic couples of lost cinema.

The Craft (1996)

The Craft has something of a notorious place within my existence. As I have written before, my parents were hippies and Wiccans, and I was raised within the Pagan community for the first eight-or-so years of my life. When my Mum's Catholic piano teacher died of cancer around that time, my mother, for whatever reason, had some metanoia and suddenly became a Catholic and insisted on taking me and my younger siblings with me - causing much turmoil between Mum and me in my early adolescence. My dad continued as a privately practicing Pagan, telling my sister Relly and me every night and every time we said goodbye 'Goddess bless you'. He continues to do so to this day.


When I was 12, my awesome stepsister was 'babysitting' me and Rell one night, and showed us the movie The Craft. I started making mental connections, and one day confronted my mother, 'Were we Wiccans?' and she was very quick to shut down the conversation. A year later, I was well-studied in Wicca and had had many informative discussions with my old man, and considered myself a practicing Wiccan. One day I made the mistake of mentioning The Craft to my Mum and she went ballistic, and confiscated my video of the movie. Upon my fifteenth birthday (the movie is a 15 certificate in the UK), I rebelliously flaunted my very own DVD copy, with the knowledge that legally my mother couldn't stop me!

Of all old favourite movies, The Craft remains mostly unchanged in my estimations over the years: it is not a great movie, but it's a bloody good teen movie that many millions hold dear as a cult favourite. Sarah (Robin Tunney) has moved to some town from San Francisco with her father and stepmother. Their house is the perfect modern witch house, and on the rainy day they move in, Sarah is confronted by a local bum carrying a snake. Her father chases him off the property. When she starts at the local Catholic school - where the kids have to wear uniform - she attracts the attention of Wiccan trio Nancy (the gorgeous Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell in the midst of her '90s peak) and Rochelle (Rachel True), who sense that Sarah is the 'fourth' that they have been seeking to complete their ritualistic circle.

Although the girls get off to a bumpy start after introducing Sarah to their shoplifting habits at a local occult store, they quickly become close friends and develop their cumulative powers. Meanwhile, jock Chris (Skeet Ulrich, also of Scream), has expressed an interest in Sarah, but spreads vicious rumours about her the day after she turns down his invitation to go back to his house. Chris, having previously done something similar to Nancy, draws both the contempt of the circle and the infatuation of Sarah, and his subjectivity to their powers is ultimately his undoing.

The girls each pursue their individual angsts with their newly developed powers: they are good characters in their own contexts, and played well by their respective actors, and they have a fabulous chemistry as an ensemble, which we all know is of high importance to any good teen movie. Although the actors were all into their 20s at the least (Rachel True was actually 30, and has aged incredibly in the years since!), they really invoke that high school feeling that any adolescent can identify with, and as a teenager, I loved that I saw parallels between the girls and myself. There is rage, and jealousy, and rivalry, and social frustration, and who hasn't been there, and felt that it was the end of the world?

Of course, The Craft is somewhat exaggerated in the realities of Pagan practice. I have never known of a Pagan who could carry out the tricks that these girls do, because that's not how magick works. It's about the use of energies and the powers of nature, it's not about levitation and metamorphosis and casting hallucinations. But the fantastical quality that the fictionally 'witchy' theme brings is a brilliant way to tie the whole picture together, and to visually manifest the raging hormones and firey emotions of a group of teenagers. The Craft is no masterpiece, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: a highly relatable and entertaining teen movie, and it is very dear to me.

The Shallows (2016)

I was pretty stoked for a new shark movie - I mean a serious one. For all the fears and traditions that Jaws began back in 1975, there have been relatively few proper shark movies since. Even Deep Blue Sea - about the only other blockbuster to spring to mind - wasn't really a serious shark movie. To be honest, I'm not sure The Shallows is either. It's a lot sillier than I anticipated a 2016 shark movie to be, and I'm still not quite sure how bad I think it is.

Nancy (Blake Lively) has dropped out of med school, has a strained relationship with her family and a dead mother, and is in Mexico to surf on some mysterious beach. She and the few other people in the vicinity get set upon by one big fucker of a shark, and somehow, she turns out to be the only one who avoids dying. But not through lack of trying!

A few hundred yards out there is a cluster of rocks that appear when the tide is low, and Nancy ends up stranded on them, with a bite on her leg that looks as though she got off really lightly when we see just how big her assailant is. Here she spends the next 24 hours or so doing very little. But she does make friends with a seagull who is also stranded because of a dislocated wing, who she names Stephen. I kid you not, I rooted for him more than for any of the humans in this entire picture.

At first it seems as though Nancy is waiting on the rock for low tide when she might have the easiest chance of getting back to shore with all her limbs intact. But low tide comes and goes and she has done nothing to end her predicament. I got to wondering what she was waiting for. Surely for an avid surfer such as herself, she has at least a marginally better chance of survival by swimming for it than waiting to die of exposure. But she hangs around for whatever reason, and when the camera helmet of her recently-masticated acquaintance washes up near her rock, she makes more effort than she has shown yet to retrieve it, apparently under the impression that the shark is out at the shops or something.

The many inconsistencies in the narrative make for critic fodder, from the small cluster of rocks supposedly being a safe retreat until the script calls for the shark to bellyflop the thing like a gym mat in the finale, to Nancy's attempt to eat live crabs rather than make a run for it. It's all the small things with this one. But the narrative itself - in the most literal sense - was what pissed me off about The Shallows. There is such heavy use of lazy narrative features, I suppose intended to help guide we idiotic viewers through this complex web of events. Nancy talks to herself constantly in a very unnatural way, I suppose intended to reflect on her dealings with patients as a medical student. But it is so stiff and expositional that I felt patronised.

Means of killing a big ass shark in open water without any real knowhow or equipment is a point that has perplexed shark movie makers for sometime, and they never get any more serious or believable! This one involves being pulled down to the sea floor by the weight of a chain that has been broken from the buoy it anchored, luring the shark at such speed as to impale it on the shards of the anchor, dodging it herself at the very last second. And all without decompression/regard for respiration. But the final image of the shark, its anterior smashed in like the crumple zone of a Volvo estate on the motor way, was fairly amusing, so I'll give the makers a little credit.

You won't feel robbed of ninety minutes of your life by watching The Shallows, and the first act has some fairly decent suspense, but it is a silly and inconsistent movie, topped off with a 'family reunion' theme so cheesy it shouldn't be approached by the lactose intolerant. But if you tune in for any reason, it should be to witness your own emotional turmoil when Nancy sets Steven Seagull adrift on a shard of surfboard. I said to myself, If Steven Seagull comes to any harm, I am SO done with this punkass movie! He is the unsung hero of The Shallows, and my new favourite actor.

The Haunting (1999)

I wanna tell y'all, my dear readers, about a little town nestled among the Lincolnshire hills and fields. An old market town full to the rafters with chavs and scum, it has aptly served as the base of my mother's career as a prosecutor for the last fifteen years. With more boarded up shops than open ones and an active disdain for the young, it is the worst place I have ever had the misfortune of spending an extended period of time in. Hell, it is the hometown of none other than the Milk Snatcher Herself, and I went to the same high school that she did. There is absolutely no redeeming quality of this town, except perhaps one... Not five miles outside of this shitheap, is a miniscule green village called Harlaxton, that is home to not much more than an old manor house that now is a campus for US university students. This manor house served as location for Jan de Bont's 1998 'remake' of the classic horror tale, here titled 'The Haunting'.

It is perhaps the most spectacular place you could imagine. Open only a few days a year to the public, my sister and I were once dragged along to the Manor for a string quartet recital. Naturally, we snuck out of the recital room and began to roam the expansive halls of the house, and it was unlike anything we had ever seen. While at this concert, Mum's friends asked her if we had seen 'The Haunting' yet, and she duly obliged maybe a week later with a VHS copy. At 12, it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen, and I was far from a stranger to horror at that point.

OK guys, if you could approach this awful script with only 10%
 of your talent....and ACTION!

I watched it again the other day, having read on forums for years how terrible people thought it was. I had long wondered what I was seeing that they weren't, and I now opine that they were able to get past the relatively few visually-haunting sequences and look at all the primary factors that came together to create this really silly movie. As a film buff, I can now say that director Jan de Bont is one of the culprits. He is another I would classify with Renny Harlin, in that through big and not-so-big budget, they have proven time and time again that they can sustain a respectable movie career without ever really making good movies. They are also both in the habit of starting strong and ending flaccid.

This kid needs a sound beating

Consider de Bont's probably best known picture as director, Speed. We all know and love that movie. But can you show me anyone who doesn't think the whole tacked-on ending with the subway train was the most festering form of overkill to what had been, until that point, a good movie? Harlin often does the same - and often overestimates his genius for good measure - and Th
e Haunting is caught red-handed committing this sin. However, rather like with Harlin's cult classic Deep Blue Sea, de Bont's fate is sealed by his overall directive technique, and his shameless misuse of decent actors.

Yeeeaaahh... if I could get a room with "less to dust", so to
speak... that'd be great!

I like Lili Taylor, and would later go on to appreciate her in such roles as Paula Klaw in The Notorious Bettie Page, but when faced with both her acceptance of this role and her performance in it, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry for her. Many a good actor has faltered under shoddy direction over the years, and she is one of them. Even the likes of Liam Neeson and the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones are not enough to save this picture, and the goofy addition of Owen Wilson just takes the cake.

Nell (Taylor) has spent the last decade or so caring for her invalid mother, and struggles with insomnia because of her constant need to attend to the old woman, even now she's dead. She receives a mysterious phone call advising her to look in the paper, where she finds an advert for a paid sleep study conducted by one Dr David Marrow (Neeson). Marrow, we see meanwhile, is in fact studying fear, and is luring bad sleepers to this "Addams Family mansion" under false pretense in order to do so. What Marrow doesn't seem to have counted upon is there being some vague familial link between Nell and the builder of the house Hugh Crane, whose horrifying portrait hangs in the foyer of the manor and gradually decays.

Cool portrait bro... paint it again.

One assertion I maintain is that there are still a handful of creepy-ass sequences that shit me up, even now. However, the movie goes waaaaay overboard with the crappy late-90s CGI, turning the third act into one long and ridiculous merry-go-round. As much as they may think otherwise, characters largely neglect to do any real thinking about their situation, and they serve as mere vehicles for a rather perplexing and weak script, so by the end of it, however creeped out (or not) we may be as viewers, we still don't give a toss about any of the characters either way. The patchy backstory of Hugh Crane and what is causing the haunting is fed us throughout, but it never really adds up, and even now, I don't think I really get it all. So either I'm getting stupider, or this is just a bad script. Tough call.