The rate at which remakes are coming out is making me increasingly nervous about the lack of good, new ideas in Hollywood. The more disturbing trend it to remake movies that people in their late 40s early 50s would remember sneaking in to long ago. The amount of time before a movie is released is becoming shorter and shorter before it becomes grounds for the remake treatment, and while some rightfully deserve this retouching, others may just be a waste of energy and time. Luckily, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre falls into the previous category as the re-imagined tale of twisted murder is vividly brought to the screen with only a few problems.

One thing that stood out to me, having not seen the original in any form, or it’s sequels, was how much Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses “borrows” from this picture. Even in its remake form the storylines are eerily parallel almost to the point of a true rip-off. While I wasn’t impressed with Corpses, Massacre has a sort of freshness to it that holds it above past movies in the genre, almost as though you need to watch it as Leatherface and the twisted manner of the film has seeped deeply into pop culture.

The story starts off with five teenagers making a trek across Texas to see a concert (with front row tickets non-the-less). When they almost hit a girl walking in the middle of the street it starts them out on a journey through death, despair, and some of the most wretched, vile people this side of the Mississippi. When something terrible happens the group is thrown through hoop after hoop as they try to track down the town Sheriff. Through the passage of time they will meet an “interesting” cast of characters and learn about true fear.

The horror staples pioneered by Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street remain with the kids having sex, taking drugs, and drinking. This is all it takes in a horror movie to seal your fate. Keep track of who does what and you may be able to guess the ending, or not. The film itself establishes the story quite well and the full circle feel gives you a full feeling when its over whereas some movies leave you wanting more in the bad sense (meaning the movie felt incomplete) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves you wanting more in the good sense (meaning the film was good).

There are some problems here and there that detracted from the atmosphere a bit. The biggest drawback is the film isn’t scary in any sense of the word, it is more suspenseful than anything, but even with the cheap jump-shocks you never actually feel any fear while watching. Secondly, the acting isn’t necessarily the high point on any of the films actors and actresses; it seems being able to act isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to actually being cast in a film. Also there are points when the believability of the film skews into the “I don’t freaking think so category,” mainly with a certain character taking on the long-known persona of a hockey masked killer.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a name everyone can ask anyone about and they will give you a vague inference of what it is about. For a movie released almost 30 years ago the story holds up quite well and the main killer shines as one of the greats in a sea of mediocre “monsters” that all have unique staples into killing, but lack the originality and simplicity that once had audiences swooning in their seats. This remake has been tagged by many as a waste of time and an effort to cash in on the license once again, but those who can see past the negative comments, and haven’t seen the original, may find a pleasant Halloween treat, and that isn’t a trick.

Since the first time I saw Pulp Fiction in DVD I knew that Quentin Tarantino was a god. The snappy, witty dialog, the extreme violence, and the interesting situations that many of the characters found themselves in all lent themselves into creating a totally original and enjoyable experience that should be enjoyed by all. Now after the $100 million dollar plus gross of Fiction and the underappreciated Jackie Brown, Tarantino brings us a tale of revenge in the form of Kill Bill: Volume 1.

I’ll say this right off the bat, Kill Bill should never have been split into two parts. No matter the reasons behind the split, this isn’t the kind of film you chop into two pieces to either a) make more money, b) get it out the door, or c) do it because you want to. Those familiar with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction will note that Tarantino doesn’t show the action of events in the order they happen. The movie jumps around from scene to scene which shows valuable insight into why things happened the way they did. Think Memento on a much more jumbled scale. Cutting Kill Bill into two parts doesn’t fit in with Tarantino’s scene by scene formula at all, and what you get are several characters introduced that appear on screen for no more than 3 minutes, and won’t be seen again until Volume 2.

Kill Bill tells the story of The Bride (Uma Thurman) who we find out is assassinated on her wedding day after leaving the ranks of assassins employed by a man named Bill. We are introduced to three of the four assassins and The Bride faces off against two of them in this installment, with two more and the final battle with Bill to come in Volume 2. The two main characters we meet in Volume 1 are O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Lui), the head of the Japanese underground and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) who is trying to settle into a new life with her daughter. Fox is only in the film for a short period of time, but her performance seems right on the mark for a former assassin trying to change her life. Lui’s Ishii is the feature of the film with an Anime origin scene and the subject of the main battle sequence in the film. For all of those who can forget Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, you may actually like Lui as a decapitating, Japanese gangster. Still the best performance is turned out by Thurman herself who continues to shine even after some questionable film decisions.

Everything you have heard about Kill Bill‘s ultra-violence is very, very true. The film has buckets and buckets of blood (more akin to a mid-budget slasher film) but the amount of press going towards this aspect is somewhat peculiar considering fountains streaming from ripped appendages approaches the campy side of violence instead of the life-life bloodshed seen in movies like Saving Private Ryan. Be warned, however, body parts fly all over the screen in this film, especially the climatic showdown between The Bride and at least 80 subordinates of Ishii. The scene transforms from color to black & white to cover up some of the fountains of blood and, presumably, give the film its R rating as opposed to NC-17. Stylistic or not, it appears as though the Japanese release will be in full color.

As with all Tarantino movies the film flows very smoothly, except for a few parts where the story meanders on seemingly meaningless points, but it doesn’t stay this way for long. Kill Bill is one of those movies where you forget you are wearing a watch because you never, ever check it. For your reference House of the Dead caused well over a dozen “watch-check-moments.”

The biggest drawback of the entire film is we aren’t seeing all of it. The reasons for the split may never be know, but what was released is a truly excellent film. Final judgment on whether or not Kill Bill is better than Pulp Fiction will take Volume 2 being released in February, but as it stands it seems as though all of Tarantino’s hard work has paid off as he has delivered cinematic glory.

One part of being an objective reviewer is to keep the opinions of other critics out of your head when you view a movie for review. Sure, there are parts of their review that sink into your head and pop up when you are actually viewing the film, but for the most part I try to keep everything separate.  The pre-release press for House of the Dead was skimpy, but what was released wasn’t good at all. Director Uwe Boll has recently stated that he wants to make a movie based on the hit Dungeon Siege or WarCraft game series, I’m hear to beg and plead Microsoft and Blizzard, respectably, to never let this man within 100 feet of their licenses as House of the Dead now has the crown for worst video game adaptation…ever.

There isn’t just one part of the movie that stands out as the real downfall, there is so much wrong with this so-called-film that I don’t know where to begin. Absolutely no part of this movie is coherent at anytime during the excruciatingly long 90 minute running time what the producers call a script is nothing more than some fanboy fantasy of gratuitous nudity, extreme violence, and the tale of an action hero in a video game.

Our story starts off with a group of friends attempting to charter a boat from Captain Kirk (yes his name really is Captain Kirk and he doesn’t like Star Trek jokes). These over-sexed teens are attempting to hitch a ride to the rave of the century conveniently held on the Island of the Dead (cue evil music). The kids arrive on the island to find the party deserted, the beer on tap, and the guys realize they have tools in their pants that must be used, for fear of rust. Once they finally discover the cheapest zombies in Hollywood are roaming around, they gear up (how convenient that Captain Kirk is a weapons smuggler) and participate in one of the stupidest action sequences ever printed to film.

I originally wanted to give props to Artisan and Uwe Boll for bringing a game like House of the Dead to the big screen. It wouldn’t be an easy task for an arcade game only designed to eat quarters, but now all I see is a huge failure and a missed opportunity to cash in on one of videogaming’s most lucrative licenses.

As the film progresses the teens are picked off one by one, but as they die the lead characters don’t shed a single tear, in fact, after one teen blows himself up with gunpowder a simple, “He didn’t make it,” is all it takes for the grieving to end. Hell, at least the underwhelming House of 1000 Corpses had a respectable house, Dead‘s house looks more like a one bedroom painted grey with a blind groundskeeper, a far cry from the mansion featured in the game.

Most video game adaptations get a bad wrap because they are, in fact, based on video games, believe it or not, but where all those adaptations tried to bring in the masses House of the Dead flaunts the movie’s roots in the stupidest way possible. Between scene transitions the film actually includes clips from the video game, and while this might be okay for stylistic reasons, some of the clips they use prominently feature “Free Play” and other arcade notifications at the bottom of the screen. It looks like some guy with a DV camera filmed some other guy get his butt handed to him and then spliced it into a low-budget horror film.

But what is a horror film without the horror? The zombies, as stated before, are so cheap looking, they look like actors with grey paint. It appears as though they attempted to include every horror cliché imaginable, but where Freddy vs. Jason made the cliché, campy horror genre funny, House of the Dead attempts to take these bits seriously leading to horrible dialog and terrible leaps in believability.

As the film begins the main characters are scared out of their minds. Zombies have just killed all of their friends, but put a gun and grenade in their hand and they become military trained experts landing aerial kicks, reloaded brutally fast, and, presumably, becoming extremely nauseated with the camera swinging around them like it does.

House of the Dead suffers from so much that the film isn’t even worth watching, your $6.50 would much better be spent heading over to the local arcade and logging in an hour’s worth of time with House of the Dead III. It would be a much more rewarding experience and cause much less frustration. Don’t even see this film if you are a fan of the series.

Wanted: An extremely hot vampire capable of leaping great distances, landing on her feet, and staring you down with hypnotic blue eyes. Tight fitting leather apparel is a plus, but not needed when wearing a beautiful, black evening gown. Applicants must have a general hatred for werewolves and weakness for medial intern humans. Some disregard for vampire canon will be tolerated.

So sums everything you could want from a vampire movie featuring the lovely Kate Beckinsale as Selene a Death Dealer whose only goal is to rid the world of the werewolves. While on a hunt to destroy werewolves Selene encounters two of her enemies trailing after a human, only they don’t want to eat him, they need him for something else. Vampires and werewolves share a common bloodline, yet when the body is infected with both viruses you die. The werewolves, on the losing side of the war, are trying to develop a werewolf/vampire hybrid, which would be invincible, and the ultimate weapon in the war. Seemingly by chance, Selene falls for Michael (Scott Speedman), the human the wolves were chasing, and the story branches off from there including internal treachery and backstabbing all around.

The film does a great job of presenting itself to the audience. Director Len Wiseman has a knack for the cinematic feel with a color-barren exposition of an ancient war in modern times. The movie does borrow a great bit from action movies released in the last 10 years. The gunplay and aerobatics of The Matrix are present; the story is reminiscent of Shakespeare, and throughout the film you will notice subtle, and blatant references to other films. Still, this doesn’t detract from the film in any way, as it is still a great way to kick off the fall movie season.

Underworld seems to play around with the established vampire canon seen in movies such as Blade and TV shows such as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Some things make sense, while others don’t seem to. While specifics may be getting a bit too nick-picky the film does a good job of staying within the reasonable bounds of believability based on the fiction. The most interesting part is the description, and origin, of Lucian (Michael Sheen) the werewolf leader who has supposedly been dead for hundreds of years.

The film does a lot of things right, and only a few things wrong. The movie does have a few slow moments, and there isn’t as much gunplay as you would expect to see after viewing the trailers and TV spots, but the final battle more than makes up for it. The last sequence had the audience roaring with delight. It has been a while since I actually heard a group of movie goers respond to an action film like that. Not even The Matrix Reloaded produced that kind of effect.

Underworld is a moderately budgeted (hence the Screen Gems banner) action film that should be very profitable for Sony. The movie knows what it is, but isn’t the action mindless romp you would have pegged to be released in mid-September. The lack of overused special effects only ads to the argument that traditional film making is far from dead, and actors, such as the talented Kate Beckinsale, make the movies for the audience. Of course I don’t think the tight leather pants hurt anyone’s opinion of the film.

The Rock has arrived, pure and simple. The Rundown may be a simple movie, with a simple storyline that wouldn’t normally be considered a star-making film, but for the wrestler turned actor, the movie represents a coming of age and a succession to the throne.

Please note, The Rundown would be nothing without the performances of the main actors, in fact I’m betting that they were specifically written, for the most part, for the thespians that step into their shoes. The film starts off in a night club where Beck (The Rock) confronts a football player on some past bets he placed, and his lack of payment. After a hilariously awkward first confrontation, and a one-liner from The Terminator himself, Beck returns to collect what he came for and opens the film with a very well choreographed, entertaining fight sequence. The film has style and this is evident in the way the director approaches the fighting in the film, as well as the dialog. It sounds simple and trivial, but the added ESPN-like character introductions in the beginning were very, very cool and never overused.

After Beck gets the short end of the stick from his bookie employer he is sent on one last job to Brazil where Travis (Seann William Scott), his boss’ son, is hiding out from some people he shouldn’t have crossed. Once Beck meets up with Travis the movie really begins. But where would a movie be without a quirky, twisted antagonist in the form of Christopher Walken’s Hatcher? Walken brings to the screen the hilarity we usually only get to see on his guest stints on SNL. Scott, brining himself away from the peanut-brained Stifler from American Wedding also delivers his usual charismatic performance as a novice-archeologist hunting for a rare find in the jungle.

The film is just one of those movies that comes along, usually out of no where, and broadsides you as a fun, witty, enjoyable piece of filmmaking that isn’t fishing for an Oscar, but isn’t settling for the lowest common denominator either. What you get is a cleverly put together buddy/action comedy (sans the buddy part) that features two of the hottest stars in Hollywood trekking through the Brazilian jungle. Being strung up in trees and violated by monkeys just adds to the fun.

The action scenes are what you pay for, and action is what you get. Beck, in the beginning, refuses to use guns, opting to only punish his victims with his fists, but in a hairy situation two shotguns make their appearance and the crowd went nuts. As I explained in my review of Underworld, it is rare that you see an audience get so involved in a movie that they cheer along with every gun blast, but it happened here.

The best reason I can determine for this interaction is The Rundown is an extremely fun movie. It won’t win any awards, it won’t even be nominated for them, but anyone who makes it to the movies this weekend, or next, to see this film will be pleasantly surprised they ever doubted the acting abilities and uber-coolness of Dwayne Johnson after his no-line portrayal of The Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns and his staring role in the film named after that character.

Truth be told The Rock makes this film enjoyable, and even if you aren’t one to watch wrestling (which I am not) you will still have fun with such a pop-culture icon as The Rock. The Rundown is one of the best reasons to go to the movies this fall.

It should be called “Sucks BALLiStic” because that is pretty much all it did for me. The real shame is I read some reviews before going in to see this mess of a movie and I was really hoping that people were just being jaded about the fact that Lucy Lui gets all of the good action roles, but, man was I wrong, this movie was just so stupid, after it was over I couldn’t help but want to take my own life rather than watch the credits and find out who made this questionable piece of trash.

I remember thinking to myself that sanding my penis off with an electric sander would have been more fun and entertaining, in fact, I would probably have enjoyed it more than the aptly titled Ballistic. Which, by the way, has the stupidest name this side of Ghost Ship.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is just as the name implies, it is a pairing of these two agents who are suppose to be real rivals of each other, the real problem comes from the fact that neither of them know who they are until like 40 minutes into the movie when they look each other up on the most poorly guarded government controlled server in the world. If a command like “GetPass[Word]” gets you into a government database this is a sorry country, but what would a movie be without wannabe crackers getting in to where they should be.

So they finally figure out who each other are, but the movie just isn’t equipped for that, you see director “Kaos” (who has the stupidest name in the history of film) only thought to give this movie about 20 minutes worth of meaningful plot, then the rest of it is just stuff happening because he wanted it to…right. So this big bad government guy wants Ecks (Banderas) dead because he is shagging up with his “dead” wife, and he wants Sever (Liu) dead because she stole his son who just happens to be carrying a piece of technology that can give a person a heart attack with the push of a button. How original, these guys must have watched an episode of “The X-Files.”

The problem is that they mini-mechanical little spider-type thing seems so post-production that I think they just added it to give the movie another excuse to blow up more and more stuff. I was surprised when I heard this movie had an R rating, there is nothing here that I haven’t seen worse in PG-13 movies. There seems to be some debate as to what a good movie is these days.

Acting is horribly done. Lucy Liu looks like she just got ripped off at Keanu Reeves’ garage sale and Antonio Banderas looks like he woke up from underneath his trailer.

With a movie like this, which has seen delays due to massive editing in post production, and seen countless other movies pull off it’s plot better and less stupid, it just feels so right to show some spite. Walking out during the retro-80’s love ballad was bad enough, but when I thought that there were others this weekend that had to go through such turmoil I cringed and said to myself,

“I want my six bucks back.”