Gafke

Peggy just might be the last innocent girl left in a post-apocalyptic world. Nine years earlier, Peggy watched as a rain of toxic chemicals maimed, scarred and/or killed her friends at her seventh birthday party. It is a memory which haunts her still, along with the deaths of her father and older sister Anna. Sheltered by her overprotective mother, the pretty sixteen year old Peggy works in the family diner in a town which has all but dried up and blown away. When a group of dangerous punks wanders into the diner one day, Peggy is immediately attracted to the leader, Jak, a tough but nice guy. It is love at first sight, but Peggy's hate- filled mother kicks the foursome out. It's too late though. Jak has already arranged to meet Peggy at midnight, and Peggy slips away with Jak and his friends to the forbidden and dangerous town of Muskeet, where the diseased and the dying go to party. Peggy is taken to the Doom Room, a scummy nightclub run by a sleazy Emcee (Robert Englund) who literally deals in blood. The toxic rainfall of 9 years earlier left many of its victims in a state of undeath, but when injected with fresh blood, the zombies are briefly reanimated. Hauled out onto the grimy stage of the Doom Room, the zombies are poked with cattle prods, twitching and contorting for the amusement of the customers. This is the Dance of the Dead, and Peggy will learn more about it in one night than she ever wanted to know.

I was really impressed with this third entry in the Masters of Horror series. This is Tobe Hooper's first foray into the zombie genre and it's a unique take. These aren't flesh-eating ghouls out for blood, just pathetic cadavers who have become entertainment in a world without cable reality TV shows.

The camera work is dizzying, the music is hard, cold and nihilistic and the performances are great, particularly by Englund whose Emcee is a thousand times scummier, sleazier and nastier than Freddy Krueger could ever hope to be. Jonathan Tucker as Jak is an extremely likable character, despite the fact that he's a thief and a drug addict - he's also chivalrous and heroic, an odd combination that Tucker miraculously makes work. Jessica Lowndes as the innocent Peggy is perfect, going from scared kid to world weary woman within an hour.

Suitably disgusting and abysmally bleak, Dance of the Dead is fun to watch and difficult to look away from, kind of like a particularly bloody car accident. I would (and will) watch this one over and over again.

I don't play video games, so I went into this film with no pre-conceived notions or expectations. I came away pretty impressed and a little disturbed.

Rose and Chris Da Silva are worried about their adopted daughter, Sharon. Little Sharon has been sleepwalking and speaking, while still asleep, of a place called Silent Hill. When Sharon nearly falls to her death during her latest sleepwalk, Rose decides to confront the issue head-on. She packs Sharon into the SUV and heads for Silent Hill, West Virginia. But Silent Hill is a ghost town that the locals don't like to speak of and which is contaminated by an ever burning coal fire deep in the bowels of the earth. After a freak car accident knocks Rose out, she awakens to find Sharon gone and a rain of ash falling from the sky. Silent Hill is indeed a ghost town, populated by demonic mutants and the ghosts of the damned. Rose is led by grisly clues deeper into the tragic history of the town and a terrible secret which involves her adopted daughter. Aided by police officer Cybil Bennet, Rose must face the dark demons of Hell and prevent history from repeating itself if she is to save Sharon.

This is quite a freaky film, though surprisingly not as gory as I had thought it would be. After a somewhat slow first 20 minutes or so, the film descends into rotting horror as air- raid sirens warn of The Darkness, deformed creatures lurch out of the shadows and the patina of normalcy literally melts away with the approach of evil. Standout characters include the sorrowful Dahlia, played by Deborah Kara Unger, who looks like the worlds oldest and saddest Goth woman, and the hideous creature known only as Pyramid Head, who stomps into view with a horde of cockroaches at his command. Radha Mitchell does a great job as Rose, playing her as a realistically frightened woman, but also as a determined mother who will stop at nothing to save her daughter. Jodelle Ferland is great in her double role of Sharon/ Alessa, a sweet, haunted little girl one moment; a creepy, frightening little monster the next. Sean Bean as the hopelessly lost Chris Da Silva is perfect; you can feel his frustration and panic. Alice Krige too is unnervingly chilling as Christabella.

The atmosphere of this movie is great - ash covered cemeteries, drippy basements, abandoned schoolrooms - all very creepy and menacing in their utter stillness. The violence, when it comes, is quite brutal. Skin is ripped off, bodies are roasted, limbs ripped away by barbed wire. Pretty gruesome, but not overly so. The demons are the real attraction here: besides Pyramid Head, there are also twisted torsos spewing black acid, deformed beings in nurse uniforms wielding scalpels and, in the scene which freaked me out the most, a man with his body bent double and his feet over his head crawling across a bathroom floor.

I've never played the video game so I really can't tell you if this was a faithful adaptation or not. But I can say that it is very original, quite spooky, satisfyingly bloody and even rather disturbing in several parts...and I don't scare easily. All in all, a very good horror movie.