HorrorPack is a new subscription service where, for a small monthly fee, you will get four random horror movie DVDs (or Blu-Rays for a slightly higher price) delivered right to your front door. They let me take it for a test run, and I like what I see (mostly).
The first unassuming box arrived quickly, bringing Penny Dreadful, Ritual, Altered, and Curse of Chucky. Crank up the player, ma!
Penny Dreadful (aka The Penny Dreadful Picture Show, probably to avoid confusion with the Showtime series) is an anthology movie, made up of three different short films, all connected by a fun wrap-around story of Penny (Eliza Swenson), a quirky, sexy, creepy undead girl who hangs out in her movie theater all night, watching scary movies with her pals, a zombie usher and a werewolf-ish thing wearing an aviator helmet. Yeah, just go with it.
“Slash In The Box” is the shortest of the three, and was over a little too soon for my liking. It tells the tale of an evil Jack-in-the-box found by an unsuspecting couple. Fun little scares in this one.
“The Morning After” was my least favorite of the group. A young lady wakes up after a date-gone-wrong to find things in her life have…changed. It takes a while to get to the heart of the matter, hehehe, so my attention wandered a bit. I couldn’t really make a connection with these characters, so I didn’t really care where they ended up. The extremely low budget and cheesy effects didn’t help.
“The Slaughter House” is a total throwback/affectionate homage to the grindhouse flicks of yore, starring genre faves Sid Haig and Jeffrey Combs. I liked this one, even though it cribbed a lot of its notes from House of 1000 Corpses and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or, at least, it seemed so at first, and in very deliberate and obvious ways. But–there’s a great twist midway through that I did not see coming at all, and it made me crack a big grateful smile. Nicely done! (except for the CGI blood. Ugh)
Ritual, directed by Joko Anwar, starts off with an interesting premise: a man claws his way out of a shallow grave in the forest, not having any idea who he is or why he was put there. He wanders through the forest a bit, stumbles into a cabin (there’s a car parked there–whose is it?), and sees a TV with a video camera hooked up. He watches a recording of a pregnant woman getting a knife shoved into her (these aren’t spoilers, by the way–all this happens in the first few minutes). He is horrified, walks backwards away from the TV, and slips in some very fresh blood. He turns around to look behind him and sees…
These opening scenes are suspenseful and full of promise, as the mystery of this man and his missing family grows and grows. The answers come s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y (even for an 85-minute-film) and don’t always make sense. There are some great scenes that really ramp up the tension, but these are few and far between. I liked this movie, didn’t love it. If you lower your expectations a bit you’ll probably enjoy it too (also: this was filmed in English with an Indonesian cast; the dialogue is sometimes hard to understand).
The next movie I pulled out of my box was Altered, directed by Eduardo Sánchez, of The Blair Witch Project. I remember seeing this before a few years ago, and really liking it. It held up quite nicely on second viewing, too. In this movie, a group of young friends are abducted by aliens, and subjected to experiments. Years later, they capture one of the aliens and proceed to take their revenge on it–but the alien has a few tricks and defenses up its, er, sleeve that make the boys’ revenge not all that sweet.
This movie is basically one long cat-and-mouse game between the alien and the guys (and the cat and mouse roles are swapped many times), mostly taking place in a claustrophobic garage. Sánchez has a good eye and really knows how to create some genuine suspense in this film. The actors are all uniformly good in their roles and the special effects, while low-budget, are very effective. A fun low-budget thriller that is definitely worth your time.
Curse of Chucky, written and directed by original Child’s Play screenwriter Don Mancini was the final DVD in this month’s Horrorpack and, while it’s not a great film, it’s not horrible either. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it–it’s got some interesting ideas swimming around in there Chucky returning to his roots and trying to tie up some loose ends), and the look of the flick is good, too. Mancini chooses some fun angles and deep focus shots that are a notch above your typical slasher.
Fiona Dourif (Brad Dourif’s daughter) plays Nica, a wheelchair-bound young lady recovering from the “accidental” death of her mom right after her mom receives a mysterious package from an unknown party containing (can you guess?) a Chucky doll (in pristine condition, not like the scarred and burned Chucky we’ve seen in the past few films). Mayhem ensues.
The special effects are pretty good (and, if you watch the unrated cut, you get to see more of them), and Mancini makes good use of the house that is the main setting for this movie, using its physical layout, hallways, and stairways to bring a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness to the proceedings. With all that going for it, it’s just not scary or suspenseful. The dialogue is clunky and the characters don’t seem to care about each other much.
My first experience with Horrorpack was a good one: I’d only seen one out of the four DVDs they sent me, and I enjoyed most of them. I can easily see myself getting addicted to random horror movies showing up on my front porch on a regular basis, and so I definitely would recommend this service. Check out their website below!
