​Recovering alcoholic, Jackie (Julie Benz) looks into the disappearance of a close friend when she goes to stay at her last place of residence.  It turns out the building she had been living in holds a dark secret.  When the tenants break the rules they are “evicted” and never seen again.  They also never leave the building alive.  In fact, they never leave at all…
 
Ms Benz appears to have developed a stronger stomach these days as this movie sees her back with Twisted Pictures and a SAW producer no less.  Apparently her stint in the franchise was rather nightmarish, quite literally.  Of course, this experience was used to hype up the release of the fifth instalment in the infamous “torture” series.  Whatever went down, 8 years later and she’s back again.  And brunette…again. Speaking of torture…
 
Although Havenhurst is a very watchable little movie, it frequently suffers from a bit of an identity crisis.  As sections of the rooms rotate and change, the movie itself flits between elements of several different movies: from SAW to Hostel, from The Hills Have Eyes to Silent Hill, it never quit finds the one movie that best represents Havenhurst itself.
 
It’s common practise to slowly reveal the killer’s appearance, but in this case, the film is shot in such a way that most of the time it looks as if his victims are being thrown around by a poltergeist.  Not only that, once we finally catch a decent glimpse of the man it quickly becomes apparent why he is kept mostly out of shot.  Firstly, he’s not scary in the slightest.  Secondly, he looks like an albino Spartan soldier from 300 (2006).
 
The same can be said of the death scenes.  Most of them appear all the more horrific because they either occur in rather dramatic screaming fashion off-screen, or during a crafty cutaway.  What’s unfortunate is that the one death that actually happens onscreen is super lame.  Badly acted and with subpar special effects.  B-movie standard basically.  It’s not very promising and calls the director’s skills into question.
 
Always a pleasure to have Halloween child Danielle Harris along for the ride, however brief.  Still beautiful and still looking half her age.  Fionnula Flanagan is perfectly cast as the sinister Eleanor.  It’s been a long while since she first caught my attention in Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others (2001).  And here she’s looking better than ever whilst turning in the performance of the movie.  Benz is more than adequate as the struggling Jackie.  She carries with her some of the compassion and sweetness of Rita from her days on Dexter (2006).  But it’s clear the movie just didn’t know what to do with her characters.  They had options and they chose the worst once.  Hence, a shitty, shitty ending to Havenhurst.
 
LAST WORDS:
It doesn’t know what kind of horror movie it is.  It’s killer isn’t scary.  And it can’t seem to pull off a decent death scene.  Other than that it’s well cast and watchable…

Low budget violence is on the menu today as Parasites lands in the Snakebite Offices, and the violence isn’t the only thing that is brutal as this is a brutally badly acted cat and mouse horror thriller. But is the film really as bad as the acting suggests.

In one of the biggest examples of not using detours three college students find themselves stranded in the mean dark streets of Skid Row when their car breaks down. Confronted by a gang of homeless people the three are taken hostage and tormented. When one of the students stupidly decides to piss off Wilco, the head of the gang, they are killed by the group. Well all but our lead student Marshall who manages to escape. Naked and afraid he goes on the run with the homeless horde on his tail.

God this film is bloody boring, there is no real tension, the acting is dire and it looks like a student film. I assume the director was trying to go for an 80’s feel, and if that is the case it does it well, the sound track however feels cheap. This is the type of film you would see in the cheap bins in your local poundshop in a year or two and even then I can’ see it being a hit. The story lacks any kind of punch. We have seen so many great cat and mouse horrors over the years but alas this isn’t going on that list.

This is the first contender for the 2017 worst films of year.  

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the latest mash-up movie to hit the big screen, this movie was long in production and I remember reading about it and thinking this could be absolutely mental, then I saw the trailer which played out like a cross between The Matrix and Sucker Punch but with corsets and zombies, needless to say I was sold. However, I was to be greatly disappointed with the final product.

I'm not familiar with Jane Austen's novel, the only things I knew about it were the fact Jane Austen wrote it and it had a character called Mr. Darcy but I'm going to assume that the only thing this movie has in common with the novel is in fact the names of the characters. Mr Darcy, played by Sam Riley, is a zombie hunter of sorts and Lily James who plays Elizabeth Bennett is one of a group of sisters trained in the art of zombie execution, they must band together to save Britain from the hordes of undead that threaten their existence.

I wasn't familiar with the director, Burr Steers but a quick Flixster search led me to the fact that he had a part in Pulp Fiction and his previous directing gigs included the two Zac Effron Vehicles 17 Again and Charlie St Cloud, not necessarily someone you would trust with a zombie movie but I guess they wanted to try and keep it light hearted and throw in some romance but that's where these movies fall down, you never quite now what genre they're trying to be and the pieces don't quite fit the puzzle.

Apart from it's obvious high production values I couldn't find much to enjoy in this movie, the zombie action was sparse and boring and given all the melee weapons on show we rarely see anything other than the undead having their heads blown clean off with a shot gun. Matt Smith was thrown in to try and add some humour to proceedings but his jokes fell flat and other big names such as Lena Headey were just going through the motions. I got totally lost in the plot, not because it was complex but because it couldn't hold my attention, there was something about the 4 horsemen of the zombie apocalypse which sounds cool in theory but never came to much more than a cool painting on the wall.

Overall this movie promised so much and delivered nothing, it could have been saved by some cool zombie kick ass action but it just towed the line all the way to the lacklustre finally. Seems there was a thing for these kind of mash-up movies in the late 2000's, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter being the one that springs to mind but I'm glad this trend seems to have died a death already. So, unless your going to give me Freddy v Jason v Ash lets leave it there.

AHHHH it is going to be so hard to not spoiler free this but dammit i’m going to try. M. Night Shyamalan has become some what of a running joke in the horror film genre. After amazing hits with The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable the director followed them up with utter shite (The Village being one of the 10 worst horror films I have ever watched). He came close to form last year with The Visit but in 2017 the Shyamalan is back baby! And better than ever.

The film centers around three teen girls who are abducted in a parking lot by Dennis, one of the 23 split personalities that live inside of Kevin’s brain. Well it mostly revolves around one girl and a select few of Kevin's personalities, the one girl in question is social outcast Casey (played by Morgan and The VVitch star Anya Taylor-Joy) who is only really there out of bad luck when her ride doesn't show after a party. The main personalities we meet are really Dennis, the more psychotic of the minds, Patricia who is the calm yet calculated one and Hedwig, Kevin's 9 year old personality who starts to grow a bond with Casey throughout the film. However what the film is really leading to is The Beast, a 24th personality which none of the 23 have ever met, but who is waiting to arise from the darkness deep inside on Kevin's mind. 

I LOVED Split, it was ball achingly tense throughout and so masterfully acted by McAvoy, who takes on all of the personalities with vigor and passion. He is ALL of them, he has gone at this film with everything and you can tell. This is a role I have not seen McAvoy do before and it is glorious. He does menacing so very well as well, making you urge the girls to escape through the screen. 

This is M. Night Shyamalan's return to form. It is very dark at points but for the right reasons. The story telling in the scenes between Kevin's Barry personality and his psychiatrist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Played by the amazing Betty Buckley) really got the character of Kevin over.

This is a must watch, especially with the trademark Shyamalan twist which I never saw coming. 

​THE STORY:
Colleen (Claudia Lee) is having a tough time convincing the cops that she is in danger.  Someone keeps leaving photographs of dead and mutilated woman for her to find.  But what do they want from her?  Meanwhile an egomaniacal photographer, played by Kal Penn, is lured into town by these same pictures with his pleasure-seeking entourage in tow.
 
Apparently this is the last film to be produced by Wes Craven, the sorely missed director responsible for reinventing the slasher film in the 80s and revitalising it in the 90s.  That’s quite a cross to bear, but does it live up to the legacy of the father of all your childhood nightmares?
 
Let’s just say it.  Kal’s character, the never-endingly narcissistic Peter Hennings, is a total douche-wad!  But he’s an extremely likeable one at that, and he steals the entire fucking show because of it.  Unfortunately the fates can only hold one outcome for such a character in the dramatic world, horror most especially.  Still, they could’ve given him a send-off worthy of his screen presence.  Thankfully he gets all the screen time he deserves, but what he did not deserve was to be bumped off like a hundred other Halloween / Friday the 13th victims.  Something similar to Robert Downey Jr’s last moments in Natural Born Killers would’ve been more fitting.
 
The killers are creepy enough.  They lurk around in their doll-faced masks like something out of The Strangers or The Purge.  We are shown a little more, but we don’t necessarily learn much of anything from that, so it may have been better just to remain a mystery.  They don’t really have much to say for themselves either.  The eventual confrontation with Colleen is not even that.  It’s certainly a different approach to forego entertaining your audience with the bullshit thoughts and motives of a complete and utter fucking psychopath!
 
This movie could have been so much more.  But when you feel yourself suffering through the cutesiness of Colleen and Chris, Kal’s assistant’s interactions, the kiss of death to the whole damn thing has been applied before you even know it.  It just becomes yet another case of watching everyone in the house die one by one.  Or in the case of a couple of post-coital, bobble-headed models – side by side.
 
LAST WORDS:
One thing we all need to accept is that unless the movie is helmed by David Fincher, we’re just not going to get that ever elusive kick-ass horror-thriller that doesn’t fall into the trap of descending into a sub-par slasher showdown, clichés and all.  I do give it points for its brutality, though.  If you’re gonna disappoint people, disappoint them hard!  Luckily this movie, for me, is saved by the skin of its teeth by Kal and carnage!

THAT SONG IS STILL IN MY FUCKING HEAD!!!! sorry had to get that out of my system. Welcome to Award season film you film obsessed lot and on the top of that pile of nominated loveliness is the...kind of feel good film of the year so far La La Land, starring Nice Guys star Ryan Gosling and Birdman star Emma Stone who play two struggling artists looking for their place in the world...only to find....each other!!! and yes I was saying that in an overly dramatic way while dancing in a flash mob in my local Odeon.

Mia (Stone) is a struggling actress looking for her big break, all the while working in a cafe on the Warner Brothers compound while she isn't jumping into song and dance with her room mates. Sebastian (Gosling) is a struggling Jazz Singer who has a dream of opening his own Jazz Bar but has to make ends meet by playing to a set list on the piano of a restaurant. The two meet after a glitzy opening dance number about it being a sunny day (I think.... the sound in our cinema wasn't amazing) when Mia is blocking traffic which met with some aggressive beeping from Sebastian. So this isn't the most romantic type of love at first sight stuff here. So the two meet again in a bar where Seb is playing Christmas tunes but just around the time he begins playing jazz which gets him fired leading to ANOTHER frosty encounter. The two finally meet at a party, go for a long walk, go on a few dates and get together. The rest of the film follows their blossoming love through the rise of both their careers, with songs, dancing and drama.

This is La La Land in a nut shell, this is a love story with a shit load of dancing and song. It is like a west end show on the big screen, and for what it is the film is really good. It is beautifully made with a bloody catchy set of songs from Gosling and Stone. You want these two to grow as a couple, you want their love to flourish. The reason it loses half a point from me is the over campiness of the colorful dancing scenes at the start and during the Sliding  Doors style scenes. The film works so much better during the middle of the film and that, in my option, ruined it a little.

This film is worth the Oscar hype and will probably win best picture. This is a great throwback to the musicals for yesteryear and will hopefully bring along a resurgence of the genre.

​THE STORY:
Indeed he is dead.  But that doesn’t stop Adam (Cameron Monoghan) from talking to his spirit, as Jamie (Noah Silver) helps him run away from his life and shows him some of the wonders of the one hereafter.
 
Indeed it can be a dark and lonely universe when who you thought you were, who you are now and who you want to be crash into each other so violently.  If you’re lucky, some of those pivotal questions that effect/affect the rest of your life find their answers, and some of your demons are laid to rest. 
 
What makes the relationship between the two boys so poignant is that the dearly departed Jamie Marks represents a life, a future, perhaps even a love that Adam could’ve had.  And the film effectively shows us why Adam was always afraid to truly be himself, to explore who he may or may not be.  The peer pressure, the cruelty he saw at school being a significant part of it. 
 
Quite understandably, most may think “Okay, so Jamie was killed.  Why isn’t the movie about finding his killer?”  -  First of all, I don’t think they had the budget to make a gay version of The Lovely Bones!  That and it’s always an uneasy tight-rope walk when splitting a movie into such differing genres.  More often than not it just becomes detrimental to the story the writer really wants to tell.
 
What may also perplex is the fact that such an intelligently made movie literally uses a closet as a link to the closeted Jamie Marks.  Well, there is an emphasis on the strength of words, powerful as they are.  Growing up hearing terms like “coming out of the closet” or “closeted homosexual”, it would seem only natural that Jamie find himself there, having never had the chance to “leave” it in life.
 
It has been said, by fuck only knows who, that coming out is as difficult as dealing with death.  In the end it makes sense that Jamie was on his own journey.  As Adam comes to discover who he really is, Jamie struggles to reconcile his inevitable place in the afterlife.
 
Needless to say, this movie is relentlessly gloomy.  Most scenes in which Jamie appears see him in shadow, so half the time you find it hard not to mistake the poor soul for a deceased Harry Potter.  With that moppy hair, thick eyebrows and round spectacles the better-looking Noah Silver is a dead ringer.
 
Liv Tyler and Judy Greer also make up the cast.  Their roles feel insignificant and limited, and in the grand scheme of things that’s how they should be.  But that doesn’t stop you wanting more from them. 
 
LAST WORDS:
It’s not what you might expect.  It’s tender without being mushy.  It’s even gloomy without being too dark.  It is also an honest coming-of-age tale that can relate to more of us than we are brave enough to admit.

It has taken me a few days to think this one over if i'm honest. I'm not sure if i actually enjoyed the film or not, is that odd? On one side of the coin I thought it wasn't the type of serial killer film I originally thought it was going to be, which is a little bit of a disappointment in my books. However! on looking back at the film as a whole, this was a refreshing take on the 'Killer hiding in the neighborhood' type of story.

Max Records stars as Social outcast, and serial killer obsessive John, an awkward teen who works with his mother in the towns funeral home. John has killer tendencies, a situation he controls via his Councillor  and his long suffering family. When a surge of killings begin to look similar John starts to suspect that there is a serial killer on the loose, but when he finds out it is his elderly neighbor Crowley he decides to begin following him. What John witnesses will mess his little mind up forever.

​And mind fuckingly messed up it is. Christopher Lloyd's Crowley is actually a monster who keeps himself alive by taking different body parts and organs from his victim. Lloyd is brilliant as Crowley, he plays innocent yet menacing VERY well. The twist of the monster worked well, giving a different dimension to the film while not making it look fucking stupid. This is really a film of two halves. on the one side John is trying to draw out the killer to do the right thing, if the right thing is to bludgeon  Crowley's wife. While on the other side Crowley is only killing so he can be with his wife till the very end, upholding his promise to be by her side till the very end.....okay so it involves him brutally murdering people and removing their various organs but it is for love! and that's rather sweet in a sick kind of way. 

I Am Not A Serial Killer isn't one of the best serial killer films out there, and so it shouldn't be. This a decent horror film overall, it is a little slow at times and the supporting cast are a little shite throughout, but lets be honest you only really care about John and Crowley so  does it really matter that much?

THE STORY:
Milton is lured by Skyler from rehab to a remote cabin in the woods to cook crystal meth for her and her psycho ex-cop boyfriend, Russell.  But after one of them dies in a violent confrontation, all three awaken the next day completely unharmed.  They soon realise they are re-living the day before and would continue to do so forever, unless they figure a way out…
 
Normally I would say, “Kudos!” for landing such an experienced composer but the soundtrack sucks cheesy dick.  And the script supervisor’s head must’ve been entirely consumed by their own asshole because the film’s story doesn’t truly kick in until 20 minutes too late, resulting in the rest of the movie feeling overly long.  Very fucking painfully overly fucking long!
 
And what is the deal with all these completely unlikeable characters?  Who gives a fuck if they are villains?  Unless they rape dogs and kill kids, or vice-a-versa, the whole lame-ass “you’re not supposed to like them” excuse really doesn’t fucking cut it.
 
That said, it’s a shame that Punch has been finger-banged by so many glaring fuck-ups because beyond all the clumsy shite is a movie that one could really learn to love.  When the story FINALLY kicks in at around the goddamn 40-minute mark, we are rewarded with a flow of laughter and bloody murder.  Not only that but ya know those aforementioned completely unlikeables?  You get to watch the worst one die over and over and over.
 
Aside from Deathgasm’s Milo Cawthorne, who plays the lead character, Milton, so fittingly, the cast could with a serious overhaul.  Most of them are badly-costumed douches and Milo’s leading lady, Skyler…probably should’ve been played by someone with a more mature air about them.
 
Oh, and the cigarettes…  How does this bitch not drop dead from lung cancer every single damn day?  Girl is a frickin’ chimney!  I dare anyone to count how many times the woman lights up.  Usually I’d suggest making a drinking game out of it, but you ain’t waking up the next morning if you play this one.
 
LAST WORDS:
It’s better than most of the crud that passes through the Snakebite offices.  And it has a nice attention-seeking name.  Blood Punch!  What it has to do with the actual movie, I do not know…  I guess it was better than Super Dumb Groundhog Day.
 

​STORY:
Jennifer (Gabrielle Stone), a smelly train-hopping fug-bug, arrives in Chestnut Hill to start a family with any man who’ll have her.  Classy!  Her prize pig victim emerges in the form of Greg (Dan McGlaughlin), a bar owner.  Trouble is, he’s already got a girlfriend…
 
Fasten yer seatbelts bitches because here we fucking go again…  The director doesn’t have anything to say with this movie.  It’s completely empty of style, mood.  Almost as if they are just going through the motions.  There’s no spark.  There’s nothing to take away from it.  And the cast are practically lifeless.  So lifeless, in fact, that when Greg’s mother, Edna appears it’s like someone popped a sandwich bag in study class.  Samantha’s performance as Sarah manages to warm up.  I’d compare it to those bland Christmas TV movies you might find playing on Channel 5 at half past 2 in the afternoon, but even they have a certain feel to them – cheesy as they may be.  With this, I felt nothing.  I gained nothing.
 
What certainly defies plausibility is the lead character’s ability to snake her way into these people’s lives.  She’s a greasy, desperate, not to mention plain thing with shabby, ill-fitting clothes that only adoptive parents would feel an obligation to go anywhere near.  Whereas the typical stranger would have nothing to do with her, let alone bed her.  In other words, she wants to introduce herself to some Pantene before she tries to steal another girl’s boyfriend.  Showers are for washing, love, not just for Psychos (1960).
 
Far be it from me to champion violence for the sake of violence (crosses fingers behind back), in the case of this movie, it’s not interesting enough to have practically all of its violence happen off-screen.  And the reveals that something terrible has just occurred go far beyond subtle, they almost seem lazy.  The action we do see is minimal at best.  The kind of crap you’d expect from an extremely amateur theatre production.
 
As the film slugs its way forward, normally I would say that it descends, but it’s too dull a film – it just deteriorates into complete nonsense.  And they never learn what to do with any of the natural lighting – particularly the daylight – resulting in more than a few smoky, blurred shots, and several scenes where someone is talking to Greg in his bar while the goddamn rapture is taking place right outside.
 
LAST WORDS:
If you want to break the spell of Christmas and New Year, this blunt object of a movie is a rather painful way to do it.  There’s no skill or craft in its making.  The story is bullshit and so is the acting.  Save your 2017 and leave this sleepy shite pile wherever you may be unlucky enough to find it.