3 Films to Get Slightly Bruised For

At chez Karl, Jeff and I plopped down and watched 3 of the 8 Films to Die For 2007.
Here is my brief take on them.


Mulberry St. (2007)



a.k.a., 28 Rats Later, or Dawn of the Rats. No, not really. But it sure seems like the writer/director was a big fan of both of those movies.. Take the remake of Dawn of the Dead, change zombie to rat-person, center the story around one crappy apartment building in New York (on Mulberry St), and do it on 1/4000th the budget and VOILA!
It has all been done before and done better. It really didn’t bring anything new to the horror table, and it committed (in my distorted opinion) one of the most egregious errors that a movie of this low caliber can commit. If you are going to be unoriginal, crappily acted, and unscary, then at least do the viewer the service of granting a gander at some bewbs or at the very least, a messy/creative death.
1 George, only because it made me feel unclean due to the general gunginess of the apartment building/environs.





The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)



Great concept, decently executed on a decent budget. Oh, and a Stan Winston production. So already, we are way ahead of Mulberry St.
The main character, a poor man’s Johnny Lee Miller, gets killed every day. And each day he comes back as a different person. Groundhog Day for the horror crowd.
There is a deeper story behind that idea and I won’t spoil it, but it eventually all makes sense.
Some decent visual effects as well as blood and gore appropriate to the story keeps the view engaged throughout. I was excited to see the crazy British antagonist from the second season of Dexter (Jaime Murray), but disappointed that she didn’t shed any vestments for the movie, as she did for the series. So my review takes a negative hit for that.
3 Georges (could have been more but Jaime had to go and get shy on us)





Unearthed (2007)



An archaeological dig and small town get terrorized by a creature in the middle of New Mexico. Been done. Not a lot of new ideas here. The creature looks like a rejected design of H.R. Giger and one of the scenes is a DIRECT rip off of the Alien series. Really bad animation on the creature’s movements and attacks, however the film does have a few great stuntman stunts, with people being blown through the air from explosions and such. When the creature starts attacking, it isn’t totally clear as to why it is doing what it is doing or if and why it has changed its intentions, even though there are several scenes which are very heavy handed plot explanation sequences. I did enjoy the ‘loogie shrimp’ though. Occasionally the creature would attack by spitting these little guys a victim and these little shrimp-like projectiles would stick in their skin and burrow inside.
Bonus point for having Charlie Murphy as one of the stranded motorists in the town, to grace the film with his Charlie Murphy-ness. He also had a pretty sweet death.

2 Georges (this movie could have been so much more)