8 Films to Die For
The After Dark Horrorfest 2007
(Lionsgate Region 1 NTSC DVD)
review by Head Cheeze

This year’s lineup of the After Dark Horror Festival features another eight films “to die for”. Personally I didn’t find any of them worth dying for, although a few of the movies are certainly worthy of suffering a bloody nose or an embarrassingly located rash. The bulk of the collection, however, wouldn’t even merit the inconvenience of a hangnail.  

 We’ll start with Borderland, a creepy, crafty, and ultra-violent road trip flick in which three friends go south of the border to a little Mexican town and run afoul of a Santeria cult headed up by a drug dealer who believes that human sacrifices render him and his wares “invisible”. While Santeria often gets a bad rap in horror flicks (the religion is actually pretty benign), Borderland is based on an actual case from the late 1980’s; a fact that director Zev Berman uses to great effect, as the true-crime nature of the plot lends both credence and levity to the goings on. It’s basically Hostel Mexicana, but this stylish, scary, and well acted film (Sean Astin is a riot as a serial killer/Santeria devotee) is more than worth the trip.

I wish the same could be said for the dismal Nightmare Man; a cheap, silly, and thoroughly amateurish shot-on-video mess. Mia and her husband, William, are en route to a mental asylum, where William hopes to cure Mia of her obsession with the “Nightmare Man”; an evil spirit who has entered her through an ancient fertility mask she’d purchased online. When their car runs out of gas in the middle of nowhere, Mia is attacked by the Nightmare Man and pursued to a remote cabin where two couples are vacationing. Nightmare Man takes ‘em out, one by one, leading to an obvious plot twist, and some of the worst make-up effects I’ve ever seen.  Sporting the production values of a Cinemax late night sex flick, and a script that reads as though it were scrawled on napkins during a weekend coke binge, Nightmare Man sucks harder than a Dyson on a shag rug.

Speaking of sucking, Lake Dead is yet another in a long line of backwoods inbred mutant flicks, with a plot about three hot girls inheriting their grandfather’s motel. The girls head up to check out the place, but, instead of staying in the perfectly good motel rooms they now OWN, they opt to camp out in the middle of nowhere for no discernible reason whatsoever other than to get them into the clutches of the incestuous Lake clan, who want to breed with them to keep their bloodline a’ flowin’.  With a plot as stale as month old bagels, flat direction, and community theater caliber acting, Lake Dead is this year’s co-recipient (alongside Nightmare Man) of the After Dark Horror Fest Coaster Award.

Things get considerably better with Crazy Eights, a slick and professional bit of spook horror featuring the B-movie equivalent of an all-star cast (Dina Meyer, Traci Lords, Frank Whaley, Gabrielle Anwar), and a plot that’s something of a mishmash of The Big Chill and The Grudge. A group of childhood pals are brought back together to attend a funeral of one of their friends, whereupon they discover his last wish is for them to dig up a time capsule they’d buried when they were kids. The time capsule, however, contains secrets long held dormant, and the friends now find themselves questioning their own pasts. While Crazy Eights borrows a lot from the J-horror genre, it’s pretty creepy and effective stuff, buoyed by some really good performances from Meyer, Whalley, and…gulp…even Lords! It’s all a bit confusing, and isn’t exactly the fastest paced horror flick on the block, but I appreciated the maturity of Crazy Eights, both in terms of plot and execution.

The good stuff keeps on coming with the excellent Mulberry Street; a novel twist on the zombie/infected humans genre in which New Yorkers fall victim to a plague that turns the exposed into bloodthirsty rat creatures. Shot in a style reminiscent of 28 Days Later, but paced and written like one of those really grimy late-seventies/early-eighties midnight movies, Mulberry Street offers scares aplenty, creepy effects, and solid performances from its cast of unknowns. This is my favorite of the bunch, and is screamin' with New Yawker attitude.

Tooth and Nail, meanwhile, plays like one of those cheap post-apocalyptic flicks that were so popular during the Reagan years, with a small cast running around an empty building for most of the film’s running time. The apocalypse here is a result of the world literally running out of gas, throwing mankind into the sort of chaos that results in empty streets and parking lots (which is surprising, seeing as how I’d assume that a lack of fuel would mean that a lot of cars would be hanging around). The drop in populous is attributed to most survivors moving south to avoid harsh winters without heating oil, but a few stragglers are left behind in the guise of a group of youngsters holed up in an abandoned hospital who rescue a young girl from a horde of scavenger types known as Rovers. The Rovers are led by a slumming Michael Madsen, who, despite being a savage dressed in animal skins, sports the same hairdo he had in Reservoir Dogs. Rider Strong (who also appears in Borderlands) and Rachel Miner (Penny Dreadful) are both hilariously over-the-top, while Vinnie Jones’ performance as a shrieking loon makes one yearn for the subtle thespian grace of the hockey masked guy from The Road Warrior.  Overlong and over-wrought, Tooth and Nail takes itself too seriously to be much fun, but is too hokey to be taken seriously; what’s left is a decent amount of gore, a few solid scares, and a cool concept wasted.

The next film up is Unearthed, a really polished and well-acted monster flick that goes to hell once the hilariously bad looking CGI beastie is revealed. The CGI here makes the claymation from Clash of the Titans look cutting edge, which is an absolute shame considering how I was really digging the film up to this point. I was also looking forward to this one because it was helmed by Matthew Leutwyler, who also directed the excellent Dead and Breakfast. Sadly, Unearthed is done in by its putrid FX, although it’s still better than Lake Dead or Nightmare Man by a longshot.

The final film, The Deaths of Ian Stone, features Mike Vogel as the titular character - a man who is forced to live and die again and again. The film borrows heavily from everything from Dark City to The Matrix, and is more Sci-fi than horror (despite the Stan Winston designed beasties), especially during the excellent first half, in which Ian Stone promises to be a genre busting mind fuck of a film. Sadly, though, things come undone in the second half, as the “mystery” is revealed, and even more cinematic properties are strip mined for ideas. Still, all things considered, I had fun with Ian Stone, despite being let down by the rather insipid conclusion, and the performances, effects, and production values were pretty damned good for a low-budget indie flick.

Overall, the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest line-up manages to outclass last year’s festival by virtue of the presence of the excellent Mulberry Street and Borderland, alone. Factor in Crazy Eights - a solid scarefest that will certainly please fans of psychological and J-horror type stuff, and there’s already a better good/bad ration than the festival’s inaugural year. Seeing as how these three films feature most by way of DVD supplements, one would be better served buying these titles individually rather than forking over the dough for the whole set, but completists with the extra scratch and space on their shelves can score the boxed set for around ten bucks a movie, which, in the case of a couple of these films, isn’t necessarily a bargain.