Category Archives: Horror

Movie Review: Clayface

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One of the standout messages in the new movie “Clayface” is that people, especially in the precarious profession of acting, are like the friends and agents who support you when your career is going well, but will run for the hills when your career goes downhill.

Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an up-and-coming actor, just nominated for an Academy Award, who inadvertently gets involved with Theresa (Ruby Sear), the girlfriend of a powerful, sadistic mob boss, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), who takes revenge on Matt by cutting up his face. After this, Matt’s career as an actor is 100% over.

Then, by a miracle, Matt runs into a genius scientist, Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is on the verge of a fantastic discovery: intelligent cells that can be injected into the human body to fix damaged cells. At first, this solution works, but over time, things start to mutate, and Matt’s face changes into many different forms until he is able to make himself look like any other person. This then becomes an evil superpower.

The last part of this story is all about Matt getting revenge on all of his enemies, and there are many scenes of impressive special effects and an even more impressive ending, many of them extremely violent.

This is a good B movie, with average ratings of about 76%, which I agree with. For fans of the DC Comics that is the source of this screenplay and due to the solid acting and special effects, I do recommend this film.

Movie Review: The End of Oak Street

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“The End of Oak Street” is one of the very few movies involving dinosaurs chasing and killing people, aside from the seven Jurassic Park films. When it comes to dinosaurs, with no exception, there will be scenes with people running for their lives and being eaten alive.

This new movie has the interesting idea of a small town in the 1980’s that transports through a portal of time back to millions of years ago, where dinosaurs dominate the planet Earth. This is, of course, completely crazy, but it sets the stage for highly unusual scenes of people running for their lives and being attacked and killed by a number of different dinosaurs around a normal lower-class neighborhood.

This film stars Anne Hathaway (Denise Platt) and Ewan McGregor (Greg Platt), who are having relationship problems with hints of a possible divorce. They have two children, Brian Platt (Christian Convery) and Audrey Platt Maisy Stella. In terms of character development and any complex story, understandably, this is not that kind of movie.

The first 20 percent of this film is just setup for the run for your life rest of the story. My main problem with this movie is that there are too many scenes where the characters do things that nobody would ever do in real life. The worst one is Brian leaving the protection of his house to chase after his dog, with giant man-eating dinosaurs running all over the neighborhood. Obviously, nobody would ever do this. There was one shocking scene that seemed way out of place in this film, where two dinosaurs are mating. This scene should have been cut from this movie, including the selfie that Denise takes of her husband standing in front of the mating dinosaurs. What were they thinking with this scene?

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 84% for this film is mostly correct, with my rating at 80% and a mild recommendation, mainly for some of the impressive special effects.

Movie Review: Obsession

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The problem with horror movies like “Obsession” is that it rides a thin line between horror and disturbing screaming, whining, and insane violence, making this more of a crazy movie about a woman (Nikki) possessed by something called a “one wish willow”, which makes her obsessed with her boyfriend (Bear). For me, this story does not meet the definition of a horror film.

The standout actor in this hard-to-watch two hours is Inde Navarrette, who probably has more time on screen than anyone else, constantly yelling and screaming, in movie history. These are not ordinary screams; these are over-the-top, hard-to-watch, pathetic screams from someone who should be in an institution. Within 30 minutes of this level of insanity, for me, it was time to go home, enough already. The worst scene was when Nikki stood in the living room for an entire day, waiting for Bear to come home from work, all the while urinating on herself and never moving from one spot. This is not a scene of horror; this is a scene of sadness, pathetic, and disgusting.

This movie starts with a relatively normal boyfriend/girlfriend story with Nikki, a very attractive woman, who just wants to be friends with an average-looking, mostly depressed Bear (Michael Johnston). On a trip to a novelty store, Bear buys this “one wish willow” stick, which, when broken in half, grants you any wish. Bear wishes that Nikki would be totally in love with him, never realizing that it would actually work, and work dangerously well.

What follows is not enough of a horror story but much more of a psychological nightmare of two hours, that includes one scene of murder, where a woman has her head rammed against a steering wheel, for yet another one of those overkill death scenes. We get it, she is dead already. Stop the head slamming. This is making me sick.

The strangest thing about this crazy film is that it is the first movie since ET, released in 1982, with the biggest box-office increase matching a rare weekend-to-weekend growth pattern. Even more insane is the mass rush of people who want to sit at the booth in “Little Tony’s Restaurant” in North Hollywood, California, for one of the scenes in this movie (see video below), where Nikki goes on one of her insane rants.

Considering how difficult this film is to sit through, I am very surprised by the very high 95% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, with my rating only 25%, with advice to run from this pathetic, sad, depressing, and too often disgusting film.