"Barrio Tales" - - Gross, Dude, Gross.

It really should come as no surprise that a movie called "Barrio Tales" features a roach coach, but damned if I didn't see it coming.

For those of you that don't know, a "Roach Coach" is a mobile restaurant. They tend to serve cheap food that can be made in bulk, like Mexican or Chinese food, and sold around business parks. They are subject to the same health inspections that regular restaurants have to undergo, but come on, there's always something fishy about food that can drive away.

When I worked at a business park I ate at the roach coach constantly. For nearly five years I got all of my meals out of a van. So when "Barrio Tales" started off their second story: "Uncle Tio's Taco Truck" and it starts with an image of this:





















Blerch. Gross.

"Barrio Tales" is a horror anthology and to my knowledge it is the first English language/Hispanic themed horror anthology. Back during the days of HBO's amazing (yet now unfortunately dated) show "Tales From The Crypt," lucky horror/rap fans such as myself were graced with movies like "Tales From The Hood," "Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror," "Street Tales of Terror" and "Hood's Hoody Hoods Tales of Hood Horror" OK, I made that last one up, but my point is the urban horror anthology has been around awhile and it's nice to see a Latino variation of that.

But really, dude, really . . .you had to ruin the roach coach for me?

The wraparound for this trilogy is two rich white kids travel to Barrio (which I always thought just meant "city" but the characters here keep referring to it as a proper noun, so I'm not sure on that) to buy drugs from a dealer named Pedro. Instead, they get waylaid by a mysterious stranger (spoiler alert: it's really Pedro) who wants to tell them some stories because Americans are always in a hurry to get what they want.

The first story is about a Hispanic maid from Barrio who works at a mansion. A bunch of selfish rich kids treat her like shit, except for one guy who can speak Spanish and his dad works as a janitor, and they end up accidently bashing her skull in. The maid's wizard aunt casts a spell on the kids who killed her and they either lose their sight, their ability to speak, or their ability to hear . . .but at the end they all end up dead so I'm sure she could have just skipped to the "death" part of the spell.

"OH NO! I can't speak! . . .or walk, or swim or do anything
because I'm dead.

That type of story is pretty par for the course when it comes to anthologies, or horror in general. A victim is wronged and the guilty are dispatched via supernatural means.

The third story, though, is about a group of illegal immigrants being kidnapped by hillbillies and being tortured to death. Which really isn't supernatural and in fact probably does happen, unfortunately. For the last half hour of "Barrio Tales" I'm thinking less about the movie and more about how much it would suck to have to sneak into a country that would probably kill you if they knew they could get away with it.

This looks less like a horror film and more
like a Tea Party recruitment ad.

Now, to be fair the third story does feature "El Monstruo" who is described as an urban legend among human traffickers and since his name technically means "The Monster" and he does survive getting shot in the chest a hundred times you might be able to say that's supernatural. But I just figure he was a buff dude on a lot of crank.

So in the first story we have the Hispanic victim and in the third story we have a lot of Hispanic victims. But in the second story, the stomach-clenching "Uncle Tio's Taco Truck," Uncle Tio is the bad guy. You see, those delicious tacos you've been eating all those years, those were the flesh and muscle tissue of human beings. But what type of people, you're wondering, would make such delicious tacos?

Were they the remains of arrogant white kids who bullied the downtrodden?

Were they the innards of "The Man" who ran the system?

Maybe they were the ligaments and tendons of an racist blowhard?

Nope! Just kids!

It's a bit jarring to go from Hispanic victim to Hispanic killer and then back again. Obviously it is the filmmakers prerogative on how the flow of the film goes. But in movies like "Tales From The Hood," "Snoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror" etc. the horror is also balanced with an idea of justice: the perpetrators of black on black crime or the white oppressors are the victim. That might sound like a bleeding heart but by having Uncle Tio go after rich kids instead of neighborhood kids he would have been less of a monster (or el monstruo, you learn something new every day) and more of an avenging angel. After all, the first and third story of "Barrio Tales" does explore the social justice angle and it would have been a more complete film thematically if "Tio's" story did as well. All I got was the uneasy feeling of knowing I ate five years worth of mystery meat.

"Barrio Tales" is an odd duck. The directing is competent, the pacing works well and the acting is decent. The picture quality and sound all point towards an eye towards quality. There's a weird interaction of characters between the three stories which is something I haven't seen in anthology before nd was a cool idea. I can see "Barrio Tales" being the first of a franchise, but even if it is a one-off I think these filmmakers have some talent and I'd like to see more from them. I enjoyed it, but unless you're a fan of horror anthologies I'd wait to catch this movie on TV.

I would stop eating at roach coaches though.

Oh, the two rich kids looking for drugs in the wrap-around narrative . . .what happens to them, you ask?

They get their throats brutally slit and are chopped up and turned into tacos that are given to homeless Mexicans!

Welcome to Barrio!

Uncle Tio eventually moved out of Barrio and
changed his name to George Zimmerman.

"Under The Bed" - - This Is How It's Done

"Under The Bed" is the perfect film to review following "Alyce Kills" and "Zombie Warz: Falls The Shadow" because it does everything right that those two films did wrong. In and of itself, "Under The Bed" is a great throwback to the horror movies of the 80's but in comparison to the two previously reviewed films it really shows how some filmmakers just "get it."

"Under The Bed" tells the story of two brothers who are being haunted, actually more like hunted, by a demonic creature that lives under the bed. The movie begins when the older brother, Neal, returns home after moving away for two years. When the creature tormented him he tried to kill it by setting the house on fire. The creature survived. His mother didn't.

While Neal was away his younger brother Paulie moved into his room and also began to see the creature. Now that Neal is back and knows his brother is in danger they have to team up to try to kill it one more time.

This plot is reminiscent of the old school horror movies of the 80s like "The Gate," "Poltergeist," "Troll," "Return of the Living Dead 2," and countless others where suburban youths are confronted with unspeakable evil. This theme worked in the 80's because of the fear of nuclear war or rampant crime; the idea that children felt out of control in a world run by adults. These types of films fell out of vogue in the 90's but now with a new generation of filmmakers and fans dealing with post 9/11 fears of terrorism that sense of no power in the world is making a comeback. Also, the writers and directors of today were raised on those 80's horror gems and now they are making their mark in the genre as well.

How this movie works when a movie like "Alyce Kills" fails is the pacing. Both have a very slow build up. It can be said of both films that not much happens for the first hour and then the last 20 minutes it becomes a different film. With "Alyce Kills" the shift is handled poorly. In "Under The Bed" the movie is already so tense that by the time the creature goes on the offensive you realize the whole movie was leading up to it. Every scene lead into each other and while building the characters and relationships up it also let you know that once the monster was unleashed these people would be ripped down. "Under The Bed" is like pulling the pin on a grenade and not knowing when it's going to go off.

But when it does . . .

I also pointed out that in "Zombie Warz" that it didn't seem like a zombie movie because there weren't enough zombies. The argument could be made that the monster isn't in most of this movie either. The difference is that every decision that the characters make is based on the fact that either A) They believe there is a monster out to get them or B) They know someone who thinks there is a monster out to get them. The cast is split between those who have seen the creature and those who think the brothers are crazy. You don't have to have a monster in every single shot to make it a monster movie but the characters should react as it is always just outside their field of vision. That is what makes a good horror movie so tense. We're scared because they're scared.

The family dynamic in "Under The Bed is excellent as well. The two brothers whisper plans on how to avoid death at the cold dead hands of the creature while their father and step-mother try to deal with two children they love but just can't understand. The dad comes off as a dick but you can tell it's out of frustration. He already lost his wife and now he's losing his children, emotionally if not physically. The whole cast is great, from the neighborhood kids who gossip about the crazy kid who set his house on fire to the hot girl next door who wants to help her troubled friend but is out of her depth. These people seem real and that makes their journey even more frightening.

One of the creepiest moments is also one of the quietest. Speaking in hushed tones in the dark, Paulie asks his older brother Neal why it lives under the bed. "I read once," Neal explains, "that you shed a lot of dead skin cells in your bed. Like while you sleep, you know, your bed is full of dead skin, and pieces of your body. Maybe it starts by, like, feeding on . . .your dead flesh before . . ."

"Before that's not good enough anymore," Paulie replies.

Disturbing.

I like to use the term "Slumber Party Movie" and based on the title I figured this would fall into that category. A good scary movie to rent for preteens. This is in no way one of those films. If you show this movie to a kid be prepared for long sleepless nights. But I definitely recommend this film to fans of the horror genre and of genre filmmaking in general. It does more with it's limited cast and budget than many other movies accomplish with more resources.

Just make sure to keep the lights on.

"Alyce Kills" - - American Sucko

"Alyce Kills" can't decide what type of film it wants to be. It starts off with a vague riff on "Alice In Wonderland" with talk of rabbit holes, "eat me, drink me" jokes, and, of course, the fact that the main character's name is Alyce. And her best friend is named Carrol Lewis. Get it? Well, apparently the filmmakers didn't because this thread is pretty much dropped halfway through the movie.

The rest of the film is split into two distinct parts: the first hour is about Alyce feeling guilty for pushing her friend, the aforementioned Carrol, off of a roof. She had a weird obsession with Carrol and is called a "Single White Female" in reference to the movie about crazy roommates. At first they play up a slight lesbian angle but that is also dropped until the part where Alyce attempts to masturbate Carrol's corpse at a funeral parlour in front of everyone.

Yeah, it's one of those movies.

The movie starts off with Alyce already pretty messed up in the head, so her descent into madness seems more like an inevitably whether or not she tried to kill Carrol. It makes the whole thing oddly pointless. Why watch a movie about a crazy person getting crazier? Where's the character arc in that?

Along her descent she meets various people who wrong her, including a co-worker, bitchy girls, misogynistic men, and a verbose drug dealer who is actually the highlight of the film. Eddie Rouse's performance as Rex has a "Breaking Bad" quality to it, and his speeches on morality and society may be a little on-the-nose but they are far more subtle than most of the film.

The last twenty or so minutes takes a wild turn for the worse and becomes slapstick comedy as Alyce fingerbangs a corpse, masturbates to war footage, picks at a guy's back acne (gross), stabs Carrol's ex-boyfriend until his guts comically spill out like a piñata, then cuts his arm off, puts it in the microwave, throws it in a blender, and finally somehow disposes of his whole body piece by piece in a garbage disposal. I've seen garbage disposals stop working after a picnic but somehow a 180 lb man, bones included, prove no match for a standard apartment sink disposal.

Alyce wanders around town with a bloody baseball bat and a hacksaw wreaking vengeance on her enemies and as awesome as that might sound it literally is the last few scenes of an already ponderous film. Before we get to the part that the title promises we have to watch an hour of Alyce wiggling around on the floor and getting fired from her job.

The film could have worked much better if they went in one direction and stuck with it. They could have focused on the descent, from sane to insane instead of insane to insaner, and played up the "Alice In Wonderland" motif (the drug dealer being the white rabbit leading her further down the hole) until she ends up transformed. They could have gone for straight character study about guilt and loss, although that would have been pretty boring because, let's face it, the parts they tried doing that in this movie were the worse. But hoping from themes of loss to a protracted scene of smashing a dead man's rib cage with an oversized baseball bat doesn't work. It tries to have it both ways, serious and dark humor, and the shift is so abrupt I spent the last ten minutes saying "What!?" out loud in disbelief.

I've seen online people compare this to "Dexter" but it in no way comes close to anything that stellar show has ever done. The descent into madness can be an interesting narrative, but when the slippery slope of vengeance becomes as compelling as a slide at Chuck E. Cheese, you can't do anything other than laugh.

"Zombie Warz: Falls The Shadow" - - What If You Filmed A Zombie Movie . . .

And no zombies showed up?

It's hard to figure out where to start this review because there are so many odd things in play here. But the fact that it is called "Zombie Warz" but there are maybe only ten zombies in the whole film is probably a good place to begin.

It's not just that there are no zombies seen. I can understand that some movies don't have the budget for huge waves of undead hordes. The zombie movie "Ashes" doesn't feature any zombies until the very end, but it is still a zombie movie because throughout the film what keeps the plot moving is the virus. It affects the characters interactions with each other and how they react to the world.

But in "Zombie Warz," the characters never really talk about zombies. It's almost like a subplot if even that. The movie could have been about the world after a pandemic, or an economic collapse, and it would have been the same narrative. It feels like the zombies were just added in as a marketing gimmick.

More proof of this is the fact that after I watched it, I looked this film up on IMDB. Apparently, it came out in 2011 under the title "Falls The Shadow" (which really just reminds me of "Sonic The Hedgehog" more than anything). It was just recently released with the "Zombie Warz" title probably to get zombie fans like me to watch it.

Another crazy thing about this movie is it's broken. I've seen bad movies before but this movie actually has the subtitles for a completely different film.

In this scene, a black woman is being burned at the stake while a bunch of hillbillies cheer. The first half of the movie has subtitles like "Sir Beautiful, Sir Beautiful", "The Head is dead but we still have enemies like flies" and my favorite:

Yes. "We must celebrate our victory! (Disco Music)" is the best subtitle I've ever seen in a movie about rednecks trying to rebuild post-zombie apocalypse America. I have no idea how this subtitle glitch could have happened and I've looked to see if any of these quotes are from other movies but I've come up blank so far.

And since we're on the topic of rednecks, this movie wants you to know it hates racism. It really thinks racism is bad. Now, I know that's a bold statement to make. The filmmakers obviously wanted to let the world know their stance on bigots even if is risky to take such a polarizing view. The bad guy is a religious zealot based on Reverend Fred Phelps, the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. How do I know that?

The bad guy's name is Reverend Phelps. Wow, that's some cutting edge social commentary!

We also see that the bad guys flag is not only a Confederate flag but it is also emblazoned with the swastika. Although why it is the traditional swastika and not the Nazi's inverted swastika they never explain. Maybe they're so racist the swastika spun around? Who knows? Who cares?

(The movie ends with Reverend Phelps being strangled to death with that Confederate/Swastika, or Confestika flag. You know, because in a zombie movie how else would you kill the main bad guy?)

"Zombie Warz: Falls The Shadow" is beautifully shot. The cinematography is gorgeous and I hope that the filmmakers involved do go on to make better movies. But between the lack of zombies, the overly simplistic characters, and the unheard of technical glitches, this movie is a definite pass.

"Shadow People" - - Boo! . . .ring

"Shadow People" wants to be scary so bad. It tries really, really hard and if I reviewed movies on effort alone I'd give this one a solid C+. But I don't.

No, I review movies based on things like plot, entertainment value, intriguing concepts, etc. These can be hard to gauge sometimes I have certain guideposts. One of the guideposts I use for reviewing a movie is how many times I fall asleep during a film

3 times.

To put that in perspective, "Shadow People" is about people who get strangled by ghosts in their sleep. And I fell asleep at 3 separate times while watching it.

This movie is not scary. It is very slow, which can work great for some horror movies, and it is very boring, which never works for any movie. If I don't care what is happening in the current scene, it is very likely that I did not care during the scene before this one, and will continue not to care for the remainder of the movie. Once a movie becomes boring it is just painful to watch. I've seen movies pull out of this death spiral but its is so rare I can't think of an example.

To me, I think to any fan of film, a boring movie is the worst kind. Bad special effects, bad plot, bad acting can all be ignored if the movie is fun to watch.

And honestly, I'd rather be sleeping than writing this review right now.

"Shadow People" is based on "the true phenomena" if by true you also consider "A Nightmare On Elm Street" to be considered based on "the true phenomena."

Wes Craven, the director/creator of "A Nightmare On Elm Street" claims he got the idea for his movie after reading a series of articles in the L.A. Times about Cambodian children dying in their sleep. I never been able to to actually verify that theses articles exist but it's a good story. Wikipedia has an an entry for SUNDS or Sudden Nocturnal Death Syndrome striking kids in Singapore, but that's about all I could find in my brief search.

And let me just say this: This movie is sold to us as a "true story" as in it is intercut with footage supposedly from news casts that really documented the rash of mysterious deaths. This is all fake. When I sit down to watch a movie and I realize ten minutes into it that I'm going to have to do research because the filmmakers think we are all idiots, it pisses me off. "The Bay" looked like a real documentary but it was not. That's fine. But this movie is dedicated in the memory of a fictional character who looks nothing like the guy who it's based on . . . this is hard to explain but you know how in those re-enactment shows how they'll try to get actors resembling the actual person? Key word being "try," because it is difficult to do. But come on, if you are making up the "real" person you can do better than this:

Here is a shot of the news studio where Charlie Crowe is about to announce to the world that Shadow People exist!

Here's what he looks like in "real life."

And what does the newscaster look like in real life?

Guess.

Come on, just take a guess.

Yup, if you said "black man" you are absolutely right. Why would they make such an odd casting choice? Why would you shoot fake archive footage and intercut it with narrative footage and make such a bizarre switch?

"Shadow People" is dull. That's inexcusable. It lies to the audience. This movie is the visual equivalent of a kid swearing up and down he's best friends with Batman.  And worst of all, it's not scary. If you watch all the way through the credits you'll see an image flash on the screen saying "Now You'll See Them Too" which is kind of refreshing because when I do see them, maybe they'll bring a better movie along with them.