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Maniac's Matinee Part I: 'Laid to Rest' DVD review...
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I thought I'd catch up this week with three new independent horror film releases. Always the insatiable horror movie fan I'm usually on the lookout for decent horror genre entertainment - especially the indie stuff. Hollywood right now is too busy remaking old crap into glossy new crap. At least the indie horror filmmakers - though shallow of pocket and access to the A-list side of the acting pool - put up an attempt at making an original mark in the horror scene. Usually it's a big smelly skid-mark, but at least it's a mark.
The rest of this week, every afternoon, (Maniac's Matinee!!!) I'll be kicking back with a new indie horror DVD release and writing up a review for it. We'll start today with this week's brand new release of Anchor Bay's Laid to Rest. Hit it again tomorrow with Splinter, (available on disc since April 14th) and close it out Friday with The Burrowers. (harder to find this one - got mine on Amazon.com - just released yesterday) All three of these films just recently hit the retail market. All three look adequately promising. Now let's get on with this bloody afternoon affair...
Laid to Rest/2009 - Directed by: Robert Hall
Starring: Bobbi Sue Luther, Kevin Gage(!), Lena Headey, Sean Whalen
The Plot: It's a slasher film. A secret slasher slashes at people. Some survive and run. Other's get slashed into ribbons. Mayhem ensues.
The Good: How about that poster eh? That pretty much screams American Grindhouse Cinema to me. And thank god this flick never attempts anything more grand than to be just that. This is a Grindhouse flick. Heavy-duty emphasis on the Grind - meaning human beings pretty much get ground-up into hamburger in this feature.
It's a dumb movie in a mostly harmless sort of dumbness. Sort of like Sloth was in The Goonies. It won't hurt you, but it might pick you up and shake the sh** out of you. And that's pretty much the death of that tragically scanty Sloth analogy - it's a stupid movie people, make no bones about it, but what it lacks in intelligent design (oh no, not that term...) it more than makes up for in wholesale amputation.
What Laid to Rest has in its corner is that it's a shamelessly blank slasher flick. There's absolutely no real back story or motive to the six-foot tall carnosaur in the steel mask, (name: Chrome Skull!) hauling around a trunk-full of dead bodies and a suitcase of sharper than surgically possible knives. He's just there to kill everybody and film himself doing it. (the dude packs around a camera on his shoulder - he's very You-Tube generation) He's never scary, never very stealthy, and never even really that outstanding of a central villain, (well the mask is pretty damn cool - Ghostrider though it may be....) but he's here to hack some people to pieces, and boy does he ever do that.
Kudos must be thrown out to Almost Human Inc. The company behind the gore effects work in this flick. I've seen multi-million dollar horror franchises that couldn't compete with the display of grue they put on here. This film plays out like a nice big steaming bowl of New England Blood Chowder. People bitched about the lack of ruthlessness of the kills in the recent Friday the 13th remake. (review HERE) I doubt anyone with a strong stomach and an appetite for destruction complained about the kills in Laid to Rest. My favorite involved a can of tire sealant and some poor doomed bastard's auditory canal.... Youch!
Last on this list of things "Good" about Laid to Rest: THANK YOU Robert Hall for putting Kevin Gage in a movie!!! Kevin played the serial-killing, Nazi, ex-con guy in Michael Mann's Heat. I've never been able to figure out why a guy of KG's charisma and talent could never land another big acting gig after Heat. All the while Beyonce Knowle's career is absolutely soaring....
The Bad: It's a cheap horror movie. People do dumb things. Cell phones won't work. Knives can be thrown with circus performer accuracy. Cops are as useless as tits on a boar. All typical of this brand of entertainment.
The Ugly: The plot - well we'll call it "the plot' - and unfortunately it's characters, tend to wander a bit. The movie takes place in a few basic locations. A house. A funeral parlor. A convenience store. And sadly the slasher survivors seem to travel back and forth between these few places much more than they should have ever been allowed to. Also the movie stalls out flat in Act II... Act III however sends things off with a geyser.
The Verdict: Fast, cheap, and nasty. Just like Perez Hilton's new career as a professional attention slut. If you don't mind a horror movie experience that reaches in no further than the outer protective cerebral sack of your brain, you shouldn't have any problem with this flick. It has more than a few gory surprises to keep things relatively gasp-inducing and fairly painless when the movie lags out in the 2nd Act. Laid to Rest is worth a night of alcohol-fueled Netflix abandon....
Part II and III of the Maniac's Matinee horror series - The Burrowers/Splinter
Part IV of the Maniac's Matinee horror series - Martyrs
Part V of the Maniac's Matinee horror series - End of the Line
Part VI of the Maniac's Matinee horror series - Drag Me To Hell
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