Dec 12, 2016

Dec 11, 2016

The Blacklist - season 1 - James Spader for president!


Unusual for me get hooked on a series. But this is quite good. See me rambling about it below.







Dec 5, 2016

Benny and Joon - 1993 - is Johnny Depp the king of comedy?


For me, this was a somewhat unknown chapter of Johnny Depp.


Bullet in the Head - 1990 - A John Woo flick reviewed


I was looking for this some years ago. The internet came into the  picture and made things easy to find ...and I forgot about it..



Nov 25, 2016

Brazil - 1985 - Terry Gilliams Fanatastic Nightmarish Flick


I actually didn't see this before. I'm glad I finally did. Watch the ckip below to find out what I really thought about it.


Nov 18, 2016

It's a Alive (trilogy) - 1974-1978-1987 - Monster babies are born, they kill!

This is actually my first attempt at video blogging, or vlogging as I've learned is the term for it. Anyway, this is the fist attempt. Hopefully there will be more and better entries.







House of Purgatory – 2016 – extreme haunted house




I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t seen a flick like this before. It’s been some years since I first heard about the McKamey Manor, a horror place so extreme that you have to sign a waiver to even be accepted to enter. It’s a place so extreme it’s said that no one ever finished it. Everything is allowed, except causing permanent injuries. At least major injuries I would think. But I really don’t know since I haven’t read the waiver…

As I see it, this trend of extreme haunted houses is the basis of this movie. Because I believe that it is a trend. If one starts such an extreme attraction other are sure to follow – and to explore the boundaries even further. The concept here is the argument if there’s really such a place, a place so horrible that no one ever finished it, or if it’s actually an urban legend. The two debaters hit the road to find or not to find the rumored place. Of course they find it!




If they choose to enter, and finish the attraction, they will get the admission fee back. However, since its Halloween, there is no fee… seems kind of strange. Anyway, the gang of four is told that the rumor is in fact false. The goal is not to enter the house and reach the top to get rewarded. They will actually start at the top and move themselves downwards. Four or five levels down. That’s a major basement don’t you think?

Soon they’re exposed to some vanilla scares which, to be honest, gets worst after a while. It starts to get to a couple of them. Typically the women, I guess we cannot escape the non-equality of the sexes. But I feel that women generally are better screamers anyway so… Come to think of it. I was expecting pretty poor acting in this production but I was nicely surprised to see that they are quite good! I believe in the emotions they’re showing on screen. Very nice!





As they descend down the levels there’s a question if this is actually a supernatural house or not. Are they really going down to hell or is the house so perfectly set up that it’ll only seem that way? Well, I believe we get the answer to that later on.

My personal thought about this is that it’s quite a nice horror flick. I like it! I liked the first half better than the last but it’s still way better than I expected. It doesn’t seem to really connect every piece of the puzzle along the way and I wished for a more complex ending, but you can’t have everything. It’s not a very long movie. About 75 minutes and I guess that’s fine. We don’t really need a longer story to get the point made. No one escapes purgatory!

6/10

Tommy Snöberg Söderberg


May 5, 2016

Dark – 2015 – An interesting persona


It’s been a while since I wrote anything on this blog. You could say that life has caught up with me lately. Poor excuse, but that’s how it is. Shit happens and we need to focus on what important. That’s something the main character in this movie should learn by the way. It’s obvious already from the start that she has a lot of issues. What kind of issues isn’t clear from the beginning but as the movie goes along we note that she has problems with herself. She lacks self-confidence and doubts herself in each and every way. Unfortunately I don’t think this is very uncommon for you women. Or anyone else for that matter. But let’s start from the beginning…




Kate has a relationship with Leah and we are made aware of the sexual tension already in the opening scene. This is also the first time we see tendencies of Kate’s issues. We just haven’t figured them out yet. At least didn’t I. From this moment on it’s really a one woman show film. That is to say that Whitney Able as the character Kate, does most of the screen time on her own. It takes an actress of great skill to pull it off and I believe that se dis a great job with it. I’m fascinated by her persona.

Anyway. When the lesbian lovers split up for the day we get to follow Kate. She lives in a neighborhood that is far from glamour. It’s kind of the slum actually. I don’t think she likes it at all but the main thing is that there is a power outage that affects the entire city, or at least a large portion of it. There are few occasions when we don’t really know what to do, I know that from personal experience, that are worse than a power outage. We so take power for granted in our daily life.





It’s obvious that she get on her own nerves when she has to keep herself company. Her demons grows stronger with each dark moment. She goes about for a drink and some company but when she gets rejected her world falls further apart. She becomes more and more paranoid in her own mind. She cannot distinguish reality from her own mind. She see enemies all around her and the smallest sound is a threat to her security. It grows darker and darker but the greatest darkness is yet in her own mind and in the nightmare she’s about to wake up from.

This is a fine movie. Great acting and skilled direction. I think it’s thrilling most of the time even if the pace might be a little too slow at times. It’s a flick that is far better than I expected. I kind of love it. Really I do! And it gets even better after a few hours, when what really happened has had a chance to melt in. This is a thoughtful movie with a great script!


8/10


Jan 13, 2016

Silent Retreat – 2016 – A new cool flick!


When I was asked if I wanted to review this movie I was actually very indecisive about it. I haven’t written a review in a long time and I thought I might have a hard time with it. But then I watched the trailer and knew I had to write about it. I also realized that the movies director was Ace Jordan which directed a short I wrote about some years ago. I knew that this would be more than the average amateurish flick that so often seek reviewers. I don’t say there’s anything wrong with that. I really like low budget movies and I often find them very refreshing. But it’s not a contradiction that a low budget movie must be amateurish by default and this movie proves it!

It might come short to the best of the bunch when it comes to acting and directing but the story is solid written and I just lover the persona gallery. There’s some characters that are so out there and I just love them. Ace also manages to deliver characters that really annoys me. That’s is at least as important as characters you love and can relate to. It creates some tension in the group of people the movie is about. There are some elements of a true slasher here. The persona gallery certainly hints about it. We have the bitch, the comedian, the natural leader and the girl next door. But it’s more than a plain slasher. It’s also a movie about team building and mental illness. It is also a ghost story of sorts.



Actually it’s hard to pinpoint what the core genre of this movie is. There is an old asylum somewhere in the background of the story. And that is of course accompanied by a raving lunatic. We get to see flashbacks of, should we say, questionable treatment once used in mental institutions. Methods that could never be used today. Or perhaps there are still places where the physicians lobotomize their patient. I hope not but I wouldn’t really be surprised. I hope the brain split isn’t carried out through the tear channel though. There is such a scene early on. Pay attention, this is actually how they used to preform it. There was also a quite high death rate among the patents.

We get to follow a boy in the past tense story and we get to follow a group of teambuilding youngsters in the present day story. Somehow these are combined and there’s also a raving lunatic running around. It’s not the slasher the persona gallery implies. I already admitted to that. But there are violent deaths involved in the story and you can see some of it in the trailer that I attached to this post. I like the movie a lot but still it seems like it’s lacking some nerve. And at the end of the day this needs to be taken into consideration when rating the flick. Verdict below.

6/10

https://www.youtube.com/user/Stark0tube (trailers, interviews and behind the scenes videos)