Movieline Online

DOOR INTO SILENCE: Director Lucio Fulci actually accomplishes something quite remarkable with his final film: although it was produced 1991 you’d swear the thing was shot at least 15 years earlier! With the same pop zooms, soft focus and recycled editing of his glory days, Door into Silence is a nostalgic trip down memory lane from the man who lived in the shadow of more prestigious Italian horror directors. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to recommend about this Twilight Zone knock-off that stretches its central idea long past the breaking point. John Savage (looking considerably puffier than his Deer Hunter days) plays a traveling businessman caught in some sort of supernatural conundrum; the sun never sets, he’s harassed by a mysterious hearse, and his path seems predetermined by a higher power. The film’s “secret” is so predictable your average housepet would be insulted. Despite being completely devoid of the director’s patented gore effects made famous in films like The Beyo...

WATCHMEN – DIRECTOR’S CUT: Does anyone really want to know about Batman’s battle with impotence? Or see what Superman looks like underneath his tighty-whities? Because like it or not, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen is going to go there, challenging the very idea of what audiences expect from the term “comic book movie.” As a graphic novel, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons creation was a seminal piece of work, dealing with mature themes wrapped into a complex story structure that strained the very staples of the format. But much of what made Watchmen unique has already been absorbed into comic book culture, making Snyder’s challenge of producing a culturally relevant film next to impossible. What he does produce is a fanatically faithful version of events set in an alternate-reality 1985 where masked crimefighters have been outlawed, leaving humanity on the brink of global thermonuclear war. Although you’d be hard pressed to pick any of them out of an acting line-up, Watchmen’s cast do...

(REC): As American remakes go, Quarantine wasn’t such a bad attempt. In fact, director John Erick Dowdle recreated some sequences from the original Spanish film almost shot for shot, avoiding the temptation to add his own creative “improvements.” And with the opportunity to finally see his source material, one can see why. (REC) is a shining example of high-concept on a low-budget, turning George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead into a carnival spook house on rails. Using the Cloverfield approach, the film is told from the camera’s point-of-view as a nightbeat reporter tags along with a team of firefighters called out to an unknown disturbance in an apartment building. The disturbance turns out to be a mutated communicable disease which quickly infects all the residents and rescuers. Authorities seal off the building, trapping the unlucky survivors inside with rapidly degenerating undead monsters. One of the hardest hurdles for any horror film to overcome is suspension of disbelief, b...

THE 10TH VICTIM: Generations from now several facts about the 20th century will still be debated. Who was more influential, Ghandi or Mother Theresa? Which group left a bigger impact on rock ‘n roll, The Beatles or The Stones? And exactly which film was responsible for inventing the bikini machine gun, Austin Powers or The 10th Victim? Well, you can check that one off the list. As Blue-Underground’s reissue of this little seen Italian import proves, director Elio Petri’s sci-fi satire beat Mike Myers to the punch by a good 30 years. Ursula Andress wears the lethal swimwear this time around as a participant in a worldwide competition called “The Big Hunt” in which combatants take turn playing the Hunter and the Victim with a cash prize of (wait for it) “One Meee-lion Dollars!” Marcello Mastroianni is her intended target, whom she woos with her signature technique. But when romantic feelings start to surface, both parties begin to question if the big prize is really worth it. Many of the...

THE UNBORN: Nazis have been a reliable cinematic scapegoat for all sorts of evil plots, from stealing the lost ark to bioengineering undead supersoldiers. But David Goyer’s The Unborn really lays it on thick, blaming the Third Reich for opening a supernatural hole in the universe and allowing a “dybbuck” to possesses the body of one unlucky concentration camp prisoner which then waits two generations for another chance to be reborn inside of one unlucky teenager (played by Odette Yustman, quite fetching in a pair of tighty-whities). What is a “dybbuck,” you ask? Well, had you studied up on your Jewish history you’d know it’s an Exorcist-style demon who possesses its way up the evolutionary chain from bugs to dogs to teenagers...or is that not the right order? The confusion is understandable. Even Goyer, who made a moderately entertaining supernatural flick out of The Invisible two years prior, seems confused about the nature of his threat. So he tosses in every cliché, even the deleted...