(Sorry for the delay on this one, but my recent streak of busy personal stuff keeps intruding on my “me time” lately… d’ohh!!)
Time for the first of this month’s Ghostly Halloween Reviews…. and a look at Philippine director Yam Laranas’ 2011 horror goodie, “The Road”. I’ve seen his earlier horror story “Sigaw”…. remade here in the US as “The Echo” and found it an interesting and entertaining piece of Pinoy horror, so naturally when this one popped up on “DVD-R on Demand” over at Amazon a month or so back, there was no excuse not to grab a copy for my own self….
Our synopsis for it goes along these lines: “Three teenagers go missing in an abandoned road after a joyride gone wrong on a haunted road. Luis Medina is the police investigator assigned to the case. In the course of his investigation, Luis finds the remains of another victim on the same abandoned road from years earlier. The corpse is identified to be that of one of two sisters who both disappeared ten years before. Luis must dig deeper into the secrets and mysteries of the ghosts lingering in the dark of the desolate abandoned road in order for him to find the three missing teens. As the truth of the story behind the mystery unravels, Luis discovers a history of brutality and murders that will shake him to the core and reveal a past better left forgotten.”
Philippine horror can be a mixed bag…. some really good, some looking more like “made for TV movies”… will this turn out to be a winner? Guess we’ll all find out, ’cause this wee Catgirl’s ready to tell ya all about it! 
Now this story was going to be different…. I knew that right from the start. Our director, Yam Laranas has structured his tale as a series of progressive flashbacks comprising three distinct sequences to tell the story of a series of grisly murders and the ghosts created by them that haunt this deserted stretch of an abandoned road outside Manila. It’s told essentially in reverse…. with much of what you watch hard to grasp until you pick up subtle… and some not so subtle… clues in the parts of the story from further back in the past. Yep…. wanna watch this one? Then you better pay attention….
We start in the present, at the award ceremony recognizing the heroism and dedication of Police Inspector Luis Medina (played by TJ Trinidad). It isn’t long before we find out that while he’s the current darling of the Press and “media ‘poster boy” for the Police, he’s not exactly on great terms with his immediate superiors. Seems he’s a little too independently minded and reckless for their tastes, trampling on toes far too often to not rock the boat politically and professionally. Immediately after his award ceremony wraps up, his Chief is approached by a woman asking for developments about a cold case involving the disappearance of her daughters, Joy and Lara Luna, some 12 years ago. He just blows her off with lame excuses…. as he’s apparently been doing for some time, so Luis asks his partner to retrieve the missing persons file for the case and despite being told to just drop the hopeless dead-end investigation, he starts looking into it seriously after all those years.
Almost immediately he gets a break…. but not without a horrible incident first. We switch focus to a couple of young girls, Ella (played by Barbie Forteza) and her younger cousin Janine (played by Lexi Fernandez) who sneak out one dark night along with Brian (played by Derrick Monasterio), Janine’s boyfriend to take Janine’s mom’s car out for a joy-ride for some harmless naughty teenage fun and so Janine can practice driving for her upcoming road test. They almost blunder into a police checkpoint and only avoid it by turning off the main road and opening a gate closing off a stretch of abandoned dirt road leading away into the boondocks. That of course is their big mistake…. and also their last.
Yep… this road is creepy. Oh… and yeah… it’s haunted too. Soon they are hopelessly lost, constantly being followed by a mysterious driver less red car with the tortured figure of a girl in the backseat, disheveled, beaten, and her head covered by a bloody plastic bag tied tightly around her neck. Eventually the trio finds that they are trapped… the road seeming warping back upon itself endlessly, keeping them from escaping the ghost of the girl and the car. It doesn’t take long for our group to get separated… after finding the remains of the red car… a hopeless wreck from years past and it’s gruesome inhabitant, the corpse of the girl with the plastic bag. While Janine and Brian run panicked through the woods, Ella manages to finally phone her father, begging for help, but it’s just too late. The unquiet dead are relentless, after all…
The next day, Ella’s father, along with Inspector Luis and other officers locate the car on the deserted road with poor Janine dead behind the wheel. Her boyfriend Brian’s corpse turns up nearby in a field and Ella is nowhere to be found at all. But….. they do also find the old wreck of the red car, and… surprise, surprise… the mummified body of the girl turns out to be that of the missing Lara Luna, whom her mother identifies through a heart shaped locket her shriveled corpse is still wearing. There’s also a creepy abandoned house found in the woods nearby… which Luis and fellow officer Allan search, to no avail. Yeah…. seems we need to go back a bit in time to find out about that place… and we will.
Flashback time!! It’s 1998… and sisters Lara (played by Rhian Ramos) and Joy (played by Louise de los Reyes) are driving along that same stretch of deserted road in the red car we saw in the future. They are soon in trouble, the car overheated and stalled alongside the road, before a teenage boy (played by Alden Richards) comes along and tells them they can get water for the radiator if they follow him along to his house… that same deserted place discovered in the future. Two girls… in the middle of nowhere…. being asked to come along by a seemingly nice young boy to a lonely house? Of course they go along… what could possibly happen? Why exactly what you might expect.
Yeah, it isn’t long before those pretty sisters are beaten senseless and chained in separate rooms by their psychopathic “rescuer” for some nefarious kooky reasons we can only imagine. Seriously… it’s a Philippine movie, so the more sick and perverted ideas for their captivity are left to the imagination, never explicitly presented… thank goodness. Here our film almost switches gears…. the first segment having been done as a fairly straight forward Asian style ghost story, while this one morphs into almost a slasher film. Well…. almost… but we’ll get to that.
The rest of this segment follows older sister Lara, who manages to escape, and then spend the rest of her time getting chased by our crazy killer all the while trying to find and save her sister Joy only to discover that she is already hours dead. Impossibly so, despite having been talking to her all that time through the walls of their rooms in the dilapidated house. Realizing she can do nothing to comfort her sister’s ghost or to avenge her, it isn’t long before she meets her demise in the crash of their car while suffocating with that plastic bag over her head, our killer escaping from the fiery crash unhurt.
Flash forward… and Inspector Medina brings his fellow officers back to the deserted house to search it and find young traumatized Ella who raves on and on about the car overheating…. the young man who offered them help and who murdered her sister…. Yep, seems our poor Ella is either possessed by, or channeling the troubled spirit of Lara. So…. is everything wrapped up?
Naw…. there’s still our killer after all… and the final flashback sends us back to 1988 where the tragic circumstances of his mean abusive mother, Carmela’s (Carmina Villaroel) infidelity, his father’s (Marvin Agustin) religious fervor, and the murder of a poor innocent girl named Martha (played by Ynna Asistio) all combine to set the young boy on his path towards insanity and murder. It’s a domestic situation that would have made Norman Bates proud…. with all the ingredients needed to take an abused mama’s boy and drive him to the psychopathic fear and mistrust of all women necessary to make a killer. By the time it’s done, you should already see the twist ending coming, but Neko’s not going to ruin things for you, even if you’ll probably see it coming a mile away.
All that is settled in our finale as the ghost of Lara finally gets her just revenge on our murderer, foiling his escape from justice when the truth is finally revealed and driving him to the suicide he richly deserves. It’s a somewhat unsatisfying ending, especially one all the loose ends are tied up, leaving one with plenty of nagging questions about how plausible the whole story is given the actual identity of out killer. But hey…. that’s for wiser minds than this wee Catgirl’s to ponder, I was just here for the ghosts….
So… how does this one feel, once all is said and done? Hmmmm? That’s certainly a question. I have the sense that I liked it….. with reservations. The very way it was presented…. as a story told in reverse… works both for it as well as against it at the same time. Mind you, that’s a tricky way to do a story. The last time I saw this story technique used, in “Bitch Slap”, it worked perfectly. Here, not so much so. Here, the various segments seem a bit “disconnected“… not really part of the same film. The first segment…. as our kids fight for their lives against the angry ghost of the haunted road… is the most successful, I think and would be at home in just about any Asian ghost story from Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia. The middle one…. with it’s slasher feel… a little less so, but that just might be this wee lady’s dislike of slasher “torture porn” stuff showing through. Yeah… yeah… Ok, I’m biased… but I’d have had no problems if our two heroines hadn’t fought so hard only to die just to tie the story together. It’s all very well made mind you… with good acting, a nice creepy locale, and some good camerawork and cinematography invoking a suitably eerie sense of it all, but despite wanting to give it a better score, it only rates 3 “Meows” out of 5 for me. It’s ultimately a nice try, but one that just misses being something more than just an “average” horror film.
It’s available on DVD…. but I can’t find any reference to a Philippine release…. just a “produced on demand” DVD-R from Amazon with English subtitles burned directly onto the film rather than selectable ones. It’s a bare bones release, but probably adequate for those of you wanting to take a look… all for about 20$ US at Amazon itself. Worth a look for the fans of the genre, but no lasting classic. Ah well…. better luck for me next time. 
Yep… there’s a Trailer, and here it goes!!
Hahahaha!! Even though I’ve decided to make this Halloween a “ghost themed” review month, our good friends the zombies absolutely refuse to let me leave them out of the fun entirely, and so this time out we take a peek at the recent Dutch Horror Comedy DVD release featuring our favorite flesh munching fiends, 2012′s 
Well… surprise, surprise… this release by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment was actually a winner, tech-wise. It appears to be a widescreen presentation of the film, with it’s Dutch audio language track and separate selectable English subs, much to my relief. Yay!!! 
Our story? Ahhhhh…. well here we break no real new ground, zombie-wise, as it’s basically the good old “Zombie Apocalypse” in Amsterdam with our heroes fighting to survive the mayhem with all the usual gory hi-jinx much as one might expect. So… who are our heroes? Ahhhhh… that would be the unlikely group of guys consisting of a couple of Moroccan immigrant brothers, Aziz (played by Yahya Gaier) and Mo (played by Mimoun Ouled Radi) and the two Senegalese “would-be gangstas”, Nolan (played by Uriah Arnhem) and Jeffrey (played by Sergio Hasselbaink). One stupid macho face-off between them at a pool party and all the guys are soon “guests” of the Dutch police, locked up for disorderly conduct under the watchful supervision of sexy, tough, no-nonsense cop Kim (played by Gigi Ravelli). One crashed Russian space station later and all heck breaks loose…. and that’s definitely when the fun starts. 
Much of our lil’ film spins on the interactions of these characters, and unless you understand the peculiarities of Dutch immigration and the recent problems of cultural integration of the various ethnic and cultural groups that make up the melting pot of modern Europe, you’ll probably miss some of the jokes. The interaction between Aziz and Mo is a bit easier to get….. Aziz, the button down “salaryman” just trying to make good while trying to cope with his con-artist brother Mo’s endless ability to get himself in trouble, always dragging Aziz down with him. It’s Aziz who ends up missing out on his one big chance to finally score with Tess…. his office’s resident siren… all thanks to him being fired by his tyrant of a boss over Mo’s endless phone calls to him at work. Yep… wanna tick off your brother? Come between him and possible sex…. that’ll do it.
There’s a definite “love/ hate” edge to the brothers relationship, but all that goes to the backseat once the proverbial poop hits the fan and that big honking ol’ space station drops out of orbit… crashing ever so conveniently on top off the very same office building where Aziz so recently worked and where sexy Tess finds herself trapped. Naturally, she phones our hero begging him to save her. Sexy unattainable Tess…. yep, poor Aziz is just sooooo going to have to risk it all to ride to the rescue, dragging the reluctant Mo and his new companions along for the mission.
All the sorts of goofy Zombie action we’ve all come to expect ensues of course. Nothing new or novel there, but it’s all done with a wry style and pacing that make this one a pleasant lil’ evening’s diversion if Zombie comedy films are your thing. There’s the silly “Let’s rob a bank” idea…. the old rivalry between our Moroccan brothers and their Senegalese companions to watch… and naturally, even though Aziz is dead set on rescuing Tess our “damsel in distress”, you just know he and sexy Kim are slowly going to fall for each other by our film’s end.
None of this is at all surprising, but sprinkled throughout our story are some truly whacked out moments. Like gangsta boy Nolan getting his fingers stuck in a bowling ball forcing him to battle the hordes of the “living impaired” with it stuck on his hand. Perhaps the best bit in the entire film being his ludicrous demise once he gets bit by the zombies. Of course his best bud Jeff isn’t going to let his pal turn into one of the flesh hungry monsters…. but what’s a best friend to do about it? Why how about “euthanizing” your friend by personally beating his brains out? 
Great idea…. if you can actually manage it. Instead we get a truly funny “point-of-view” look at this notion from Nolan’s viewpoint as Jeff pounds away on his face with Mo’s assistance…. over and over… with absolutely everything at hand including… you guessed it… a kitchen sink. To hilariously 
So….. after all this will our goofy heroes still manage to find the lovely Tess? Will they manage it before she turns “zombie”? Will they all make it out of Amsterdam alive? All this and more gets wrapped up by movie’s end… along with the arrival of Russia’s answer to Rambo to deal with our contaminated Space Station in a spectacularly explosive fashion for our climax.
I have to say, even though this one is no 
The UK Region 2 DVD…. released under the title 
This time out, it’s some military flavored chills here at the ol’ Litterbox from South America with a look at 2011′s Columbian horror film 
Yeah…. somehow you just know that a film like this is gonna end badly for our camo clad heroes. It just always does in these films. So…. what’s the attraction? Why it’s like getting a war movie 
Does that mean there’s no room left for suspense? Of course not. The best of these films delight in taking that seemingly unbeatable group and stripping away their defenses to show them as no more able to handle themselves in the face of supernatural evil than us ordinary civilians. 
Our heroes are the stock stereotypes you’d expect, the “by the books” officer seen as weak and inexperienced by his pack of gristled killers and always just a step or two away from an accidental fragging, the token “native” guy who knows all the local superstitions, the stock “vicious thug” who enjoys the job of killing a wee bit too darn much, and our main character…. the loyal trooper forced by a dirty war to do those things to win it that a man can never wash off his soul.
Rebel prisoner?…. Witch? Or maybe even…. Demon? It’s never really explained, although our “indigenous” trooper seriously suspects all of the above. Stuff starts to unravel pretty quickly after she’s set free…. and subsequently manages to escape into the foggy labyrinth of the trenches around the base, but the real danger starts as the troopers all slowly become unhinged, one by one succumbing to the odd nature of the place to either end up killing themselves or their companions. Perhaps the scariest bit of the entire film is the death of one trooper…. freaked out by his encounter with the rotting remains of the soldiers originally assigned here, found in a pit just outside the camp towards the middle of our film…. that causes him to constantly obsess about feeling the terrible itching of parasites burrowing away under his skin. What’s a guy to do to deal with that? Why skin himself alive with a really sharp bayonet of course…. 
One by one our brave commandos meet their terrible fate. You just know there aren’t going to be any survivors… no way… no how. Somehow, that’s alright though. By them end, you can honestly see that even our hero has reached the conclusion that maybe death is the answer…. the only right answer… to balance the scales for the terrible things that they have all done in the name of war. Mind you…. I imagine he never expected to get his karma balanced by being brutally killed by a homicidal “bruja”…. but hey, that’s how it goes sometimes. Well… that, and it sets things up nicely for 
So how did this one grab me? Hmmmmm? While it certainly tries to do a lot with it’s small cast and stellar locale, I have to say I was a wee bit disappointed that the supernatural elements weren’t explored as fully as they might have been. Certainly the film and the story didn’t need them…. it would have worked just as well as a straight psychological thriller exploring the power of fear, guilt, isolation, and self-loathing to bring about a horror just as deadly as any ghost story. Having added the idea of our “witch”, I wish there had been a bit more back story to explain who and what she was supposed to be. Without that, she was merely a superfluous plot element introduced and then basically ignored till the conclusion rolls around. Even then…. you still don’t know if she’s really a witch or merely a crazy woman…. Very confusing and disappointing.
Overall, I give this one a decent 3 out of 5 
Yep, I know it’s been a while, but your Favorite Catgirl’s back at it again, this time with a look at the latest creepy Korean ghost story to find it’s way to my mailbox, 2012′s haunted video thriller 
Now, since we’ve all been down this familiar “long haired ghost” road before, it’s certainly fair to say that if we were expecting something new or novel out of this particular film, well then we’re all probably going to be disappointed. 
Sadly…. for the most part… this wee Catgirl would have to honestly answer, “Yes”. Luckily for us…. at least in my experience, Korean films are usually well made, and even the most imitative of them rarely fail to be somewhat entertaining on some level. I’d have to say that that’s where this one falls… in that comfortable, if not inspired level of genre film.
You know the idea…. post stupid, often risqué videos on social networking sites to gain the most “views” and thereby clinch the title of “most watched”. But everyone wants that fame…. so the videos have to become more daring… more controversial… and more intrusive into the lives of strangers on the street who’s lives become nothing more than fodder for the camera. If that sounds sort of stupid… especially given the fleeting attention span of the average Internet surfer, it is….. and that’s really the whole point of our story.
It’s this idea that raises the film up from being just another “cursed video ghost story” and gives it something to really think about. That and the way that social media’s obsession with voyeurism at any cost can be something that easily becomes more dangerous to the lives and happiness of people than any vengeful ghost could ever think of being…. and all without anyone even giving it a second thought.
Gonna be a problem? Oh yeah…..
Soon she finds the harsh glare of “celebrity” to be a lot less glamorous than she imagined… and worse, the ghost has only begun to torture her by ruining her reputation. It’s ultimate goal is to brutally kill her and anyone else who’s seen the video clip in blind obsessive revenge.
So then…. even with it’s interesting comment on modern social media stardom and given the rather tepid scares and my pretty much overall “take it or leave it” feeling for it, I suppose it would be fair to give it 3 
Every once in a while a movie nearly manages to sneak past this wee Catgirl, and this one almost made it. Produced by WWE Studios… the cinema arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc 
Surprisingly… at least to me… this lil’ unpretentious film wasn’t filled with “testosteron-y” ex-wrestlers with anger management issues and lil’ or no real acting talent. It has a small cast of actual actors, some of which I’d even seen before in other films… good films in fact. We get Dominic Monaghan (
So what’s the deal? Acid rain? Crop failure? Chemical and biological warfare run amok? We never know….. and guess what? It doesn’t really matter…. because that’s 
It isn’t long before the deserted road leads them past an empty ruin of a farmhouse, and even though the group seems unwilling to pause… as if they have to keep moving to keep one step ahead of some terrible thing dogging their trail… their leader Rick (played by Dominic Monaghan) insists that they check it out, and stay until the poring rain passes giving them all at least some measure of rest.
That of course turns out to be a big, big mistake. We get a little bit of character interaction once our bedraggled group settles in to wait out the rain, and it doesn’t take long to pick up on the vibe of familiarity between our three male characters, Rick, Henson, and Adam (played by Shawn Ashmore). They all knew one another before… well… the “bad stuff” all started. Our two female characters are recent additions…. sexy Shannon (played by Shannyn Sossamon) who’s managed to link up with Adam in some fashion, and the quiet, dangerously loner Mary (played by Ashley Bell). Shannon doesn’t much like Mary…. and certainly doesn’t trust her… but it’s clear to see that the men recognize her obviously formidable skills in the whole survival game. But we don’t get a whole lot of time to learn much more than that before the proverbial “shit hits the fan”.
The next day, because Henson is still too sick to move on, Rick decides that the group will stay an extra day over their protests that such an idea is a bad one. He has the girls act as lookouts, while they search the house for anything that might be useful when they finally leave. After Shannon has a confrontation with Mary over her unwillingness to open up and truly be a part of the group, they split up. Mary tries to bathe and wash her clothing in a stream, but gets attacked by a random stranger whom she narrowly manages to kill with her shotgun. Meanwhile, back at the house, our little group finds an unexpected cache of canned food in the basement only to realize too late that it’s only the bait in an elaborate booby trap that kills Rick and is also designed to seal them in the basement and ring a loud bell that can be heard for miles. Awwwww crap.
The girls rush back, while the “owners” of the house show up to see what they’ve caught. Who would these guys be? Why the scouts for one of what turns out to be the survivors greatest fear: a cannibal clan. Oh yeah…. with the world’s biosphere wrecked and stocks of pre-disaster foodstuffs dwindling, it seems that some groups of survivors have taken to cannibalism to exist. The scouts tease our boys until the ladies arrive and the deadly Mary wastes most of their creepy butts but not before gets “outed” by their leader once he catches a glance at her very own clan sign branded on the inside of her upper thigh.
Mary’s a cannibal? Oh yeah…. and that doesn’t set well with our lil’ group even though she saved them. They beat her senseless and question her. At first they figure she was supposed to infiltrate their group and lure them to this trap, but later realize she’s not connected to this new clan. Forced into the leadership role by Rick’s death, Adam goes a little psycho… having a flashback to the beginnings of the apocalypse when he lost his wife and daughter to a cannibal attack (Our only true color sequence in the entire film, by the way)… and takes it out on Mary, beating her mercilessly and torturing her by slicing her tattoo off and trying to force feed it to her. 
But, Mary’s one vicious capable lil’ survivor, and manages to free herself and prove to the men that she could have killed them at any time if she’d wanted. Beaten, bloody, she admits that she’s exactly what they think… but that after her younger sister, also a member of her old clan, was hurt in an accident, her clan had killed her and eaten her despite her being one of them. After that, Mary killed the entire clan in their sleep and went her own way wandering alone and just wanting an end to her suffering before encountering her current companions. She’s fully aware of the horror she’s become, and you get the idea that she’s looking for a redemption that she doesn’t really believe she deserves and is merely seeking a chance to die…. except that at her core she’s too much of a survivor to manage it. She tells them that they won’t be able to escape if they run…. the clan will only track them down no matter what they do. They have only one chance, fortify the house and make taking them just too costly for the clan to accept.
Back at the cannibal clan, we are introduced to the clan’s leader (played by Michael Eklund) and his two scary, scary cannibal kids, an adorable lil’ brother and sister. Where the adult cannibals are scary enough…. having recently been civilized people who have chosen to become the unthinkable to survive a dying world, the two little children know nothing else and are the most chilling and amoral creatures imaginable. Brrrr!
Run out of bullets? Why that’s what machetes, axes, knives, and crude spears are for, silly, and boy, do we get to see how that works! One by one they thin out the cannibals, but then Shannon manages to kill the leader’s son and he goes completely and totally apeshit. No convincing them it’s too costly to kill them now. It’s a savage fight to the death from that point on, and Henson goes down before the clan decides to trash the trap house and burn it to the ground to force them out as dawn breaks. Mary tells Adam and Shannon to flee out the back while she goes out the front to face down the leader and his remaining fighters. She knows it’s going to be the last thing she does, but by this time she’s finally ready to embrace her death if she can somehow atone for her horrors and give them a chance to get free.
That would work too… except that at the very end, Adam just can’t leave her to die alone, especially when Shannon reveals she’s stolen all the rounds out of Mary’s shotgun to make certain she has no chance to survive… just as they had planned. Sending her away to make her escape alone, he goes back just in time to tip the scales and give Mary the fighting chance she needs to kill the rest of the clan. Too bad he gets himself mortally wounded in the process. Then, while Mary sits with him outside the burning house as he bleeds out, they watch the sun rise and share a moment of empathy that tells Mary he just can’t hate her, that for all she’s done, for all she is, she’s still human and a part of “the family”. Maybe a little stereotypically melodramatic plot-wise, especially given he’s the guy who carved a chunk of her thigh off and tried to feed it to her only hours before… but it worked for me. Too many Asian films…. I’m just used to those dramatic overblown sad endings I guess.
Mind you… there’s a bit of nasty stuff to go, with the lone Shannon running afoul of the last of the cannibal clan, the leader’s little girl. She’s a mean lil’ kiddie with a skinning blade, and makes short work of Shannon out there in the woods. She tries to finish Mary off too… attempting to use her innocent lil’ kid look to lull her into letting her get close enough for the kill, but Mary’s still the meanest survivor around, beheading her with a machete before she can blink. Then, with only a moment to bind up her wounded thigh, our film ends as it began, with Mary walking away back down that lonely road.
Oh yes…. this one is a grim film. No doubt about that, and it’s a simple one as well, but in this particular case that sparseness works to it’s advantage. You aren’t given any superfluous elements to deal with, and as a result, the film is lean and plays like a “snapshot” of a particular time and place…. one you’d never, ever, really want to witness… as it tries to show just how far even the most civilized people can fall when mere survival is the only prize to shoot for. Our cast hits all the right looks… these are average people, dirty, grungy, wearing a wardrobe that looks like a bunch of heavily armed homeless people rather than the usual “biker gang crossed with Heavy Metal concert” look you see in most films. The actors are spot on, and I really have some serious praise for Ashley Bell who gives Mary that skinny, starving “alley cat” look of lonely feral meanness tempered with a hint of sadness…. just perfect for the character.
Now it’s fairly clear that this one isn’t the usual cup of tea that shows up here at the ol’ Litterbox. Nope…. not by a long shot. Still, while the scary stuff is my ordinary choice movie-wise, I actually 
“Miss Conspirator tries to capture some of the madcap feeling of films that remind me of some of the old Bob Hope romantic comedies like
This time out, it’s a socially isolated cartoonist given the old “mistaken identity” plot and forced to keep herself one step ahead of a triad of interests while learning that she has more strength than she ever thought possible hidden waaaaay inside herself. There’s a romantic angle too… as the somewhat mousy Soo Ro falls for the dangerous charms of undercover cop “Red Shoes” (played by Yu Hae Jin).
Many films like this one try to balance the style of comedy, action, and romance to achieve their success, story-wise. Sadly,although I really wanted to like this film in that way, I have to say that for the most part it struggles to find that 
Hmmmm? I think my biggest disappointment was in the romantic setup between Soo Ro and the roguish Red Shoes that shows soooo much promise early on only to somehow crash and burn by the third act… and never recover. Yes, yes…. I know that Red Shoes betrays Soo Ro for the money, but since when has that ever really stood in the way of true romance? Seriously…. There are moments when you can sense a really connection between the two… a chemistry that told me they should have ended up together despite everything, but ultimately they don’t. And that’s a shame…. even if it plays into the film’s final moments in which the transformed Soo Ro shows her sister she’s strong enough to stand on her own…. and maybe even show the world a thing or two. I think I still would have liked a romantic reunion to go with it. Just my personal feeling, but there you go. Basically… the darker moments of this story, and there are a few… are a bit too dark and sad to truly fit the theme and in my feeling, bring the story down, leaving you a bit too blue to fully enjoy the finale.
Actress Ko Hyun Jung captures the essence of both the eccentric shy home-body Soo Ro as well as the ultimately brilliant, slightly dangerous,and surprisingly capable “Miss Go” she eventually transforms herself into. Yu Hae Jin’s “Red Shoes” is that credible “Bad boy with a Heart of Gold” that works well as her romantic interest. Most of the rest of the cast put in solid work too to ultimately make
The DVD? It’s Korean…. and so that means a Region 3 NTSC widescreen format with almost perfect English subtitles for our viewing enjoyment. Right now, it’s available in a deluxe 2 disc “First Pressing” format for around 30-36$ US, but I’m pretty certain it’ll show up with a much easier on the pocketbook price when HK gets a release. That’s when this wee Catgirl suggests the average Gentle Visitor spend their hard earned money…. you’ll probably thank Stephen and I for having waited. Seems we were both fairly disappointed this time out…. 
It’s back to some familiar ground this time out, Review wise, with a look at the latest Philippine horror film to make it’s way from sunny Manila to my chilly lil’ winter wonderland here in the US, Regal Entertainment’s 
Our Heroine this time out, is Mylene… a pretty young Medical student with a tragic past that eats away at her and fills her with a guilt over the death of her “siamese twin” sister Myra when they were separated surgically not long after birth. By sheer luck, it was Mylene picked to live by her mother and doctor… even if it meant stealing away her sister’s healthy heart to replace her own misshapen and useless one. Grown into a lovely young lady (played by rising Tagalog model and horror star Lovi Poe), she lives a life that she feels she “stole” and despite all reasoning, feels she really doesn’t deserve.
It’s this self loathing misery…. along with the simmering secrets of all the other tenants at her boarding house… that gives rise to the “ghost” of our story. It spends most of the movie creeping about… randomly taking a form of some deceased loved one of those at the house to punish them for their sins. What sorts of sins, you ask? Well…. to start with there’s Tatay Nanding (played by Jaime Fabregas) the landlord of the house who seems to be experiencing visitations from his 6 year old son. His wife left him years ago… for reasons nobody seems to understand… and he has the creepy habit of burying food near one of the flowerbeds to appease “something”. His murdered son, buried there by him years ago perhaps?
What about Mrs. Arevalo (played by Gina Alajar), a bitter old alcoholic who swears her son Javier (played by Guji Lorenzana) isn’t really dead… that he’ll return to her and make everything right for her again? Mmmm… now that’s not likely to happen… or is it?
What about the miserable unwed mother Alicia (played by Ria Garcia) who moves into the house and that begs med student Mylene for that ever so illegal home abortion? 
Sound like there’s a whole lot going on? Well what if we throw in Mylene’s cheating boyfriend Paolo (played by Benjamin Alves) and her best friend Joanna (played by Empress Schuck) who gets stuck with the coveted plot element of
about her guilt over the unfortunate yet ever so unavoidable death of her conjoined twin sister… we’d have had plenty of movie to enjoy. The side plot about her boyfriend not understanding her reluctance to get intimate (and show off the scar she is so ashamed of) when you get the idea they are supposed to be getting married soon is not terribly well developed either. You find out he cheats on Mylene with another girl when she refuses his advances….. although he tells her that the affair was “meaningless” and he loves only her. 
Ahhhh… and our ghost. It spends the film taking the form of those people the victim feels the most guilty about. You know it’s the ghost because it has the habit of having it’s eyes turn to silvery mirrors at those dramatic moments you might expect. This has to be about the cheapest and least effective practical make-up effect I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s really pretty bad and you can tell the actor is as blind as a bat when trying to look all ghostly and scary…. as they grope about in a lame fashion trying 
These problems are a shame really… as there 
Much better was her interaction with her psychic BFF, Joanna. Empress Schuck had that simple role down pat and I wish only that she could have done more in the way of balancing things overall rather than spending her time merely trying to get Mylene and Paolo back together. Still, I guess that’s what BFF’s are for… 
Too bad. I’d really wanted to like this one more than I did.
Back from our Christmas Holiday fun and games… and right back at things with a look at the new Aussie 
So…. why was this one on my “must see” list in the first place? That’s easy. 
So what’s the scoop? Well we get right off to a start meeting our film’s hero, Josh (played by Xavier Samuel). He’s a young hunky Lifeguard who spends his days at the beach with his best buddy Rory (played by Richard Brancatisano) doing all those “Baywatch” kinda things you might expect. When we first see him, he’s suffering the effects of a night of serious partying, courtesy of his friends in celebration of his upcoming nuptials with Rory’s sexy sister Tina (played by Sharni Vinson). There’s some sweet romance in store while best bud Rory takes Josh’s job of setting the buoy for him so Josh and Tina can savor their last days here in the Aussie beach paradise before Tina and he jet away to Singapore for her new job and their happy married life together. Sounds dreamy, doesn’t it?
Well it would be, if it didn’t happen to be the middle of the big yearly migration of the great white sharks off the Queensland coast. Awwww crap… somebody’s gonna get eaten, aren’t they? Oh yeah. Say Bye-bye Rory…. You can pretty much guess the rest. Josh blames himself for his buddy’s death… he can’t face Rory’s sister Tina…. their engagement is off and she leaves for exotic Singapore without him… and he basically descends into that miasma of depression that sees him give up everything good in his life to end up working a crummy stock clerk position in a supermarket. At least he should be safe from the sharks from then on, right? Nawwww… wouldn’t have much of a movie if that happened now would we? 
10 months later… and miserable Josh is living the zombie-like life of the working poor. He wakes up… drags himself to a job he hates… but despite it all, he can’t stop noticing that this day is somehow… different. The dogs are howling… the birds are all freaked out and heading for parts unknown… and yet despite all these ominous dire warnings, human beings keep on with their silly lives, oblivious to the catastrophe coming for them like a rabid pit bull running amok.
Now you just know… that this day of all days will be the one where sexy Tina will wander back. I mean… of all the crummy supermarkets in all the crummy beachfront towns in Australia… what’s the chance she’ll wander into the one her ex-fiance slaves away in? 
So who else do we get in our “stock characters” list this time out? Well there’s two guys planning to rob the store… Doyle (played by Julian McMahon) and Kirby (played by Dan Wyllie). Doyle’s our basically “good guy” conflicted thief forced by circumstances to pull this job with psychotic Kirby… who you just know is gonna mess things up by killing some innocent shopgirl right before the big ol’ earthquake and tsunami trap them in the store.
Ahhhh... but we’re not done yet. How about if we throw in Jaimie’s boyfriend Ryan (played by Alex Russell). He can stick up for her and get himself fired by his boss Mr. Jessup (played by Adrian Pang) filling the ever so important role in our movie as the complete a**-hole you can’t wait to see get munched on by our fishy friends.
OK….. OK. That ought to be enough people for our crazy killer sharks to try eating…. let’s have that crazy earthquake followed by the tidal wave to beat all tidal waves. It scoops up some of those migrating sharks and turns our supermarket into an Olympic swimming pool, killing a buttload of extras in the process and creating the perfect situation to test the mettle of our hero Josh as he tries to redeem himself and win back his true love. Oh…. yeah…. and save some of these other characters in the process. Hey, it couldn’t hurt, right?
Everybody is going to be electrocuted by some dangerous dangling power lines? Don’t worry… Steven’s ready to man-up and swim into the utility room in a cobbled together anti-shark suit made out of broken shopping carts just to throw the main breaker and save them…. even though it’ll either get him drowned or eaten. 
Surprisingly… although sadly much of our lil’ film is awfully predictable and formulaic… in the end I actually have to admit that I kind of liked this one. Much of that was less about the film, I’m thinking, and more about the goofy fun I had watching it with Carolyn and her sister’s family on Christmas Day. The kids loved the silliness of it all…. and I certainly had loads of laughs as we watched the gruesome goofy action unwind. Given that… although I’d say this one is in no way a “timeless classic”, it nonetheless would be a great lil’ evening’s silly harmless fun for the right group of genre fans.
Don’t know how most of you spent your Christmas o’ Gentle Visitors, but this wee Catgirl spent hers, as I’ve already posted about, watching goofy Horror movies with my sweetie and her family during our annual Holiday excursion. We all had a nice evening of thrills, chills, and bloody gory fun and….. after another week of busy personal stuff for your Favorite movie watchin’ Catgirl…. it’s time to finally review the second movie of our Christmas 
Atomic mutants. Now this wee Catgirl’s seen those before…. waaaay, waaaay back in the day when lil’ Kittengirl Princess Miyuki was but a slip of a lass, genre director Wes Craven gave us the killer cannibal clan of inbred mutants that lurked in the old Nevada nuclear test site in 1977′s 
Now our movie gets off to a pretty standard start as we get introduced to our little cast of characters. We get Chris (played by Jesse McCartney), his girlfriend Natalie (played by Olivia Taylor Dudley), along with their mutual friend Amanda (played by Devin Kelley). These guys are traveling around the tourist spots of Europe. Eventually they end up in Kiev, Ukraine, so they can visit with Chris’s crazy brother, Paul (played Jonathan Sadowski), before heading off to Moscow where Chris intends to propose to Natalie. 
Naturally, it isn’t long before you figure out that younger bro Chris is the steady reliable one in the family and Paul the disappointing screw-up always making Chris the fall guy that ends up paying for his mistakes. So, when he suggests that they all go on some dodgy “extreme tour” of the abandoned city of Prypiat conveniently located right next to the radioactive ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant….. Hmmmm? How could that end up going badly? 
Setting out with the addition of a another couple doing the “backpacking around Europe” thing, Norwegian girl Zoe (played by 
The tour seems safe enough… with lots of prowling around the deserted “ghost city”. This… while not the scary adrenaline surge of the last reel, is none the less this wee Catgirl’s favorite part of the film, capturing perfectly the odd, eerie… emptiness… of what the real Prypiat is probably like. I’m not certain where it was filmed… somewhere in the post Soviet ruins of Hungary or Romania or the like. In any event…. this may not be what the real place looks like today, but it certainly looks just the way this wee lady pictures it in her mind.
Now… given that there really 
So… where were we? Ahhh yes. By now you’ll have figured out that 
So how do I rate this one? Sadly… as a horror film, I have to give it only a barely earned 3 
Finally!! A day off all to myself and a chance for another waaaaay overdue Review here at the ol’ Litterbox.This time out, it’s the latest creepy Philippine ghost story to find its way across the big ol’ ocean direct to your Favorite Catgirl’s DVD player… 
So… the first thing you’ll want to know about this one is… is it actually a ghost story or just one of those films where the main character is… well… merely unhinged and hallucinating throughout the whole story. I’ve been forced to sit through quite a lot of these lately
Our tale revolves mostly around Rosa (played by Angel Aquino). Basically she’s got herself one dilly of a problem. She’s the doting mother of two boys… Amiel and Rommel (played by Martin del Rosario and Enrique Gil respectively) and as fate would have it, Amiel has inherited a genetic disorder which slowly steals his eyesight eventually rendering him blind. Rosa blames herself for his unfortunate condition and dedicates herself to keeping him safe and happy. It’s a tough job… and a responsibility she also puts on her other son Rommel as well. He’s a good brother and does what he can to help out, but you just know this all is going to put a strain on his relationship with his Mom…..
Things jump forward… and the family moves to the old pension house her now deceased aunt has left them, trying to somehow forget the accident and move forward. Pity the place is haunted. 
How about the almost perquisite “Bad Boy” crowd that every angry young man starts running wild with when there are problems at home? Oh yes…. and naturally those nasty bastards will try to rape sweet Amanda and frame Rommel for the crime. Ummm? Won’t that piss off the spirit of Sandra and bring down her ghostly wrath? You betcha!! 
Yep…. your Favorite Catgirl’s actually been to the cinema for “Movie Nite” this time out, and the film? Why, the fantasy fairy tale action horror mash-up, 
This wasn’t just a “Movie Nite Feature” for lil’ ol’ me…. it was also a chance to finally throw off the generally 
Being a fan of weird foreign films only reinforces that, given that most of the ones I want to see don’t ever get released to cinemas here in the states outside of larger cities. But… with a girlfriend who aches to see a movie once in a while… any movie… where they actually 
So what’s the general idea with this one then? Well Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola (of Nazi Zombie film 
No… not really. It’s all very easy to follow… perhaps even a bit too easy… with a cast of somewhat simplistic and cardboard character stereotypes doing all the expected “action-y” things you’d expect in a film like this. This is probably the biggest problem this film really has when looked at critically. There really are no surprises with our cast list… and no real chance to see them grow beyond these stock character types into something novel or new. Too bad, there’s a lot of potential fun in the idea behind this film.
I did rather like the spunky duo for the most part, and especially felt a sort of guilty jealousy at Gemma Arterton’s cool confident femme fatale approach to the role of Gretel. She’s a real “hands on” sort of lady when it comes to the profession of Witch Slaying…. just the sort of role model this “Warrior Princess” wannabee always wanted to be when she was a wee lass. But for all of her bad-ass coolness and Jeremy Renner’s smart-ass womanizing antics as her brother and fellow hunter, Hansel, neither really comes across as any more than just that shallow image. Supposedly, these two have a unbreakable brother/ sister bond due to their tragic mysterious loss of their parents as kids, but no real time gets spent to highlight that side of their relationship. In short… there’s no “heart” to these characters to make you become invested in them as a viewer.
Mind you… our local villagers are just as bland and undefined too as well as our evil coven of witches, led by the “Grand Witch” Muriel (played by Famke Janssen). There is a lot of interesting questions completely ignored by our story that could have made for some excellent scenes. For one… although the film makes it clear early on that witches are easy to detect by the corrupting degeneration that magic use has on their bodies, apparently a “Grand Witch” can use her powers to mask herself with beauty and move among the people unsuspected. Given this, I had sort of hoped to see Muriel working to undermine our duo throughout the story in her human guise as one of the villagers until she was unmasked in some dramatic fashion…. had expected to see what sort of “day job” she had at the very least. But… nope.
Not that I didn’t enjoy what was on hand for the show… it’s only that this one probably wont end up becoming a “classic” film, warmly or fondly remembered years from now by hordes of fans and spawning imitators of it’s own or donating any new lasting ideas to the genre. 
Seriously. These ladies are a whole lot more than just butt ugly old hags that like to eat kids… it seems all of them can mix it up like psychotic MMA fighters on crack. Thank goodness Hansel & Gretel have some crazy mad hand-to-hand combat skills of their very own…. as well as the biggest collection of crazy Steampunk weapons and gadgets outside of Van Helsing’s Vatican supplied toys. Do either of these story elements make all that much sense? Nawwwww… but boy, do they make for some fun looking fight scenes. And basically that’s pretty much what this movie is all about.
So what 
Luckily, our heroes have no intention of letting them get away with this plan and so the big ol’ fight is on, with Hansel and his sister finally discovering the truth behind the disappearance of their Mother and Father all those years ago along with uncovering the secret of their seemingly miraculous immunity to the mind influencing spells of witches. Oh… and they even manage to find out that for all their hatred of all things “magical” and “witchy”… it seems not all Witches are Evil…..
Yes… pretty much as both Carolyn and I… as well as most everybody else watching figured out… our two heroes are, themselves, the children of one of these “White Witches”… yep, those earth friendly wiccan women who know all about healing and fertility and the “good” powers of magic, pledged never to use their spells to harm humans. One of the required elements of the evil ritual just happens to be the heart of a White Witch, sliced from her chest at the culmination of the Sabbath. Darn…. guess it really sucks to be Gretel, given that.
Thankfully, Hansel has caught the eye of Mina (played by Pihla Viitala)… a local White Witch nearly burnt at the stake by the crazy local Sheriff until the duo saved her from him and his paranoid deputies. There’s a really nice potential for a sweet bit of romance… but unfortunately it seem they needed more screen time for the butt-kicking so this all gets somewhat abbreviated and pushed to the back burner. A shame… since we both were in the mood for a little romantic sub plot by the middle of this one. At least she’ll be on hand to lend some magical support once the gigantic blockbuster climax rolls around.
The film builds to that big crescendo… as every Evil Witch left in the world seems to show up for the big ritual and our heroes arm up with their allies to climb up to the old stone circle on the haunted mountain and go all 
So… all together we ended up enjoying ourselves, even if the experience really was nothing more than a vicarious bit of cinema junk food. I can still give this one a very solid 3 
At last!!… some free time for another review… and just when your Favorite Catgirl thinks she’s seen about every wacky horror film to come her way out of Asia… something always comes along to prove me wrong. If you think that Indonesia’s haunted toilet epic 
Now…. first up… this isn’t a Japanese movie, it’s a Philippine one…. so all slimy demonic tentacles aside, with Pinoy film sensibilities on hand, you just know there wont be any 
