Zombieland is exactly what you would expect from its title and marketing, it’s a movie, about a land full of zombies, there’s no time for back-story, explanation, or exhibition about how, why, where, or what turned almost everyone into mindless, feasting machines, instead we (as an audience) are simply introduced to the post-apocalypse and to a few survivors who are each searching for something, and trying to stay alive.

The majority of the story focuses on Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus (everyone is named after a city to keep from developing emotional attachments with real names) who is trying to get back to his namesake hometown and see if his parents are still alive. After Jesse introduces us to his “Rules” for staying alive in a zombie infested land, he eventually meets up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and the two of them eventually happen upon Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and a tenuous alliance is formed.

There are stories of an amusement park where zombies don’t roam free, the girls are trying to find it in Los Angeles and reclaim some of young Little Rock’s youth while Tallahassee is running from his former life and Columbus listlessly wonders after being left with nothing.

The film is lean, mean, and incredibly well written and well acted. Harrelson in particular looks like he’s having the time of his life working on this picture as a redneck with a penchant to crack wise, kill everything in his way, and paint the number “3” on every care he’s able to steal. Eisenberg also excels playing a Michael-Cera-lite role of the fumbling everyman who eventually gets the girl and turns out to be more than he thought he could be.

First time feature film director Ruben Fleischer busts onto the scene with a love for beautifully crafted action sequences and slow motion cuts. His opening credit sequence is amazingly well done and immediately gets you in the mindset for this film.

The most surprising thing, like Shaun of the Dead before it, is that the combination of guts, gore, and guffaw is perfectly presented, easy to follow, and, most importantly, perfectly executed. Hearty belly-laughs are interplayed with sight gags and even a little bit of emotion as the four survivors grow closer.

Zombieland may very well be one of the best films of the year and easily one of the funniest, everyone owes it to themselves to partake in the experience and remember to keep up on the cardio an avoid the theater’s restroom.

There comes a point in your movie watching career where you just can’t take it anymore, the inane characters, the poor writing, the movie studios pandering to the lowest common denominator and using silence and big jumps as a reason to go to the movies. Halloween, The Shining, Psycho, Alien and Aliens, these are all iconic suspense, thriller, scary movies that will live on for years to come because they broke the mold, they did something different. They created characters, atmosphere, they were written in a smart way for the audience to grasp on to, for them to enjoy.

Unfortunately suspense movies have taken a decidedly different turn as late, they’ve turned into ways for studios to pad the bottom line by dumping $10 million dollars into a film, making the budget back in the first week, shooting to number one (or in the top three) at the Box Office and then dropping off. Case-in-point: The Strangers.

The Strangers, allegedly only based on an experience by first time writer/director (and former gaffer) Bryan Bertino where some stranger came to his front door looking for someone else, then having his neighbor’s homes broken into, is full of everything that’s wrong with today’s “scary” suspense films. It features unlikable 2D characters whose only purpose in this hack production is to die and to make the audience feel smarter.

James (Scott Speedman) and Kirsten (Liv Tyler) return to a secluded house after a friend’s wedding reception in what was supposed to be a romantic get away, before Kristen turned down a marriage proposal from James. Instead of champagne and rose pedals, we get awkward silences and ugly bridesmaid dresses. After a stranger comes to the door and asks for someone who doesn’t live there, the torture begins. Through the next hour you’re treated to one of the dumbest sixty minutes of moviedom while each of the two main characters makes stupid decision after stupid decision. From the cliché cache we get, “There’s nothing out there”, the person who is there, but then is gone in a split second, the screaming at people asking “Why!”, and the more than brilliant, lets hang around and see what happens.

The movie has no point at all, aside from only having two central characters; we still get nothing to hold on to. Kristen is a chain smoking annoying woman who, like all scream queens, whines and screams a lot, and Speedman plays the everyman who has his heart broken, only to be rewarded with knife wounds to the chest (big surprise, he dies). When Kristen asks why the strangers are doing this, they reply “Because you were home.” Simply amazing, that fleeting line of dialog shuts the door on an unremarkable bore-fest that simply festers in the mind until it ends and receives applause only because the audience is free to leave.

The Strangers offers nothing unique to the genre what so ever, and aside from a few cheap scares has little to nothing going on for a near 90 minutes. You almost feel dumber as the movie wears on, knowing that if you stared in a horror film, it’d be about four minutes longer than it took you to find the shot gun, because you’d have gotten the hell out of Dodge.

How do you continue on a successful horror series when your antagonist is very, very much dead? Unlike your Friday the 13ths and Halloween movies, Saw‘s lead baddie is down for the count, for good, no crazy reincarnation, no sudden body disappearance, Jigsaw’s body is autopsied in the first scene of the latest sequel in the franchise in gruesome detail, and there’s no body coming back from that.

Still, a little problem like being worm food will not stop Jigsaw’s work, and that’s what Saw IV sets out to do for the audience, show them that even though the frail man we’ve seen deteriorate in the past three movies has finally died, his work is just beginning and the franchise lives on.

The film works as sort of a prequel and sequel to the first Saw and Saw III, respectively. We learn how John Kramer (Tobin Bell) came to be Jigsaw after a traumatic event in his life sent him over the edge, forcing those who have wasted their lives to save themselves or be flushed from society.

Saw IV‘s timeline is a big part of the movie so we’ll avoid that spoiler here, but part of the film responds to the aftermath of the previous films in the series. After Rigg (Lyriq Bent) sees the dismembered body of his former partner Kerry (Dina Meyer), who was killed in Saw III’s rip-splitting “angel trap,” he begins to question his life.

Jigsaw sets him up to perform a series of tests, to see what he sees, feel what he feels, and do what he does in order to allow people to save themselves. Throughout the film Rigg is tasked with making the choice of saving criminals or leaving them to save themselves, he has 90 minutes to pass all of his tests before several of his colleagues will die. This is the standard part of any Saw film, a person being put in an impossible situation, testing what we come out to see as a weak point in their personality and Jigsaw giving them a choice.

The second storyline in the film deals with the aforementioned flashbacks to John Kramer and his wife, Jill (Betsy Russell), and how their relationship rapidly falls apart as John begins his work as Jigsaw. We are even treated to Jigsaw’s first trap which even falls apart and fails as his subject attempts to solve it. Luckily the killer who never kills has a contingency plan, but it’s nice to see Kramer as a normal human being for a while. In fact, as the revelation of the event that caused Jigsaw to emerge is played out, you honestly feel bad for the guy, making him the most likable character in the film and the one the audience is likely to be the most sympathetic towards.

The film’s big reveal (as with the three previous entries in the series) gives the audience a lot of information to process at once. After first viewing the movie, especially with this entry, you’re likely to be more confused than anything. However, as you digest everything that happens in the final minutes, put the pieces together, you then realize that the writers have outdone themselves once again in creating a memorable way to end yet another volume in the franchise.

After it’s all said and done, Jigsaw’s taped message for Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) is very true, this was only the beginning and we’re less than a year away from finding how it all starts again.

Another week, another remake, and another review pointing out the obvious, Hollywood has run out of ideas and have now run the barrel so dry for even retread material that they have made it all the way to the 1980’s for their remakes. It should be an undocumented rule that if a studio executive is old enough to remember the original hitting theaters, there shouldn’t be a remake in his lifetime. Unfortunately, this rule may never be observed.

The Hitcher is this week’s flashback, the story of a troubled man who hitches a ride with two teenagers on their way to spring break in Lake Havasu (something Arizona residents know not to do). After a violent encounter the title character, assuming the name John Ryder, proceeds to set up the two up in a series of events leading the New Mexico Police to assume they have murdered and killed their way across the state.

This gruesome adaptation of Robert Harmon’s 1986 original written by Eric Red doesn’t seem to really go anywhere during its 83 minute runtime and I found myself mourning over the destruction of the Olds 442 car the couple was driving than I do their impending deaths. The biggest disappointment is the utter lack of any type of character development. Sean Bean’s turn as the violent rider is a great casting choice, there’s just no dimension to the character. Why is he doing this? What are his sinister motives for seemingly hacking and slashing people apart whilst driving through the desert? There seems to be no motivation or anyway to identify why he is doing this. Jason had the fornicating camp counselors to hate, Freddy the parents who burned and murdered him, The Hitcher just seems to be having a bad day.

Other than Bean’s inspiring casting is the eye candy that is Sophia Bush who spends the entire film nearly half naked holding a gun two times to big for her until she unloads a shotgun in the film’s final scene. Her beau (Zachary Knighton) seems to be just along for the ride and to offer another lead character to follow, but anyone who’s seen a horror movie before can guess his fate from the very beginning.

It isn’t that I don’t like remakes of old horror movies, quite the contrary, Dawn of the Dead is a prime example of how to modernize a classic with not only a fresh coat of paint but also reworking the interior mechanics to fit into today’s society. The Hitcher feels like someone spray painted over the top of what would pass as a good horror movie in the late 70’s early 80’s without any regard for making the film actually work in today’s society.

From the very beginning when we see a rabbit decapitated crossing a busy highway you just know the film is going to be gruesome because it can. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, even decent movies are this way (Hostel, for example), but what they have is the pedigree of the director and his or her style coming along for the ride. Music video director Dave Meyers show his pedigree by creating a one-off visual palette that seems to be over as fast as it starts and has no lasting effects on the audience.

Everyone in Hollywood needs to just try a little bit harder, especially on films still being shown regularly on late night cable channels.

Black Christmas, a remake of a 1974 film of the same name, is everything you would expect from the modern Hollywood, a paint-by-numbers horror film that does nothing to further the genre, and in some respects, is so amateurish it may not even quality for credit in a upper-division college course.

There’s so much wrong with this film and it doesn’t even dare to appease the audience by including the three horror staples we’ve all come to know and love: gratuitous nudity, creative deaths, and genuine scares. The only nude scene we get is a girl showering from behind, the deaths are all the same, so much in which they could have used the same death scene over and over again and you wouldn’t even notice, and the scares are all terminally forced.

Even writer/director Glen Morgan’s attempt at a twist is over shadowed by his penance for shooting people from the ankle down and almost blatant attempt to make you feel as though you know who the killer’s sister is. By the time he throws her image on the screen after a flashback you know it can’t be that obvious, and you aren’t that stupid. The prolonged ending to kill off a few more people in non-inventive ways is just a ten minute segment tacked on to a film that’s already 90 minutes too long.

The cast, composed of mostly C-list catty celebrities who can easily pull off being a spoiled sorority girl merely serves as canon fodder as the deaths pile up. Of course, in typical Hollywood don’t-go-in-there-stupid-thinking half of the deaths could have been avoided if the characters had any intelligence beyond painting fingernails and calling each other a bitch. The most notable cast member being Michelle Trachtenberg, who now appears doomed to star in a subpar movie in every single genre possible, but you’ll be hard pressed to put face to name during the end credits.

A few names you will remember are the aforementioned Miller and James Wong who served as members of the crew for the excellent, and genre-defying, Final Destination series, but it seems each has fallen on hard times and will put anything out for any easy few million.

So, in the end, Black Christmas is another Hollywood remake that doesn’t turn out so well. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything you’d like in this entire film, because you’ve seen it all done before, and sometimes better. One can only hope that studio big wigs get a clue, but we all know they won’t as long as there’s more movies from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that people barely remember, they’ll be ready to green-light muck like this. 

Most sequels or sequels of sequels tend to lose some of the spice that made the original movie worthy of having a sequel in the first place. There are franchises which buck this trend and those that follow a rollercoaster ride of mediocrity and glory as the series progresses through the years. The Saw series is a good example of the ladder with both the original and first sequel building up and progressively getting better with more inventive deaths, clever schemes, and twist endings that really made you think in the end. Saw III, the latest in the annual Halloween series, manages to hold the bar firmly in place for the series, but doesn’t raise it any particular way for the franchise or the genre.

Saw III picks up almost immediately after the events of Saw II, and as an added bit of closure we’re treated to how the second (and first) movies really ended by the screenwriters desire to tie up some loose ends. Granted they do leave a few questions, but we ultimately figure out what happened to Adam (the photographer from the first film) and Detective Matthews (who was last seen chained in a very familiar looking bathroom). Luckily for us the events that took place in the previous film are not only touched upon, they are a big component of the overall movie’s plot. Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is still very much near death and Amanda (Shawnee Smith) is still working as his protégé in continuing on his work.

Unlike the first two movies the main “conflict” with a character or characters being put in an impossible situation (two men trapped in a bathroom, a group of people in a locked down house infected with a virus) plays second fiddle to Jigsaw himself and his final elaborate games to test the will of a person. I’ll be honest and say that I was surprised by the movie’s final revelation about who each of these people was and who was being tested for what. While the twist is no where near as good as the original, or as out-of-the-blue as the second film, it sits well with the viewer as you pick up bits and pieces along the way. We almost called part of the ending about half way through the film, but the ultimate climax and finale were a surprise.

The beauty of this series is it knows what it is, it knows the genre, and it knows who its fans are and it doesn’t bend over backwards to appease those who are not part of its core audience. The filmmakers at Twisted Pictures and Lionsgate know that male teenagers and early twentysomethings will turn out in droves for a film like this around Halloween and are prepared for the most obscene and grotesque display they can get a ticket for. These movies are cheap to produce, very cleverly marketed, and appease a devoted fan base.

Saw III lacks the horror aspect of most of the films in the genre in which the purpose is not to scare you, you won’t find any jump-out-of-your-seat moments here, but what you will find are plenty of reasons to cringe at the screen as decaying pigs become liquid, bone meets skull, and explosives meeting the human body. Saw III handles all three of the previous statements wonderfully and delivers a rewarding experience.

The second sequel, however, may not be as accessible as the first, or even second, films in the series for new viewers to be introduced. With so many flashbacks to the previous two movies, and the events leading up to them, and after them, this is definitely a more fan oriented film geared towards bringing closure and setting up the next sequel. How the will pull off nearly-greenlit Saw IV is anyone’s guess after the finale of this installment, but I can honestly saw I’ll be in line, ticket in hand, next year at this very same time.

Final Destination delivers everything you would expect from a horror movie sequel, but this series has a lot more to live up to due to the cleverness of the first two movies in the series and the most inventive deaths this side of Friday the 13^th. Sure, the series hasn’t really broken any new ground, or gone gangbusters at the box office, but Final Destination and its two sequels are guilty pleasures that you watch with a group of friends as you see just how twisted the screenwriters can be towards these characters.

If that sounds morbid, it should.

Whereas the first movie focuses on an airplane tragedy, and the second a multi-car pile up on the interstate, the third takes a smaller, although still lethal, approach. This time a rollercoaster is the ride of death and like the previous two movies; one character has the creepy premonition that all the kids looking for fun are going to die.

The series has always been one of my personal favorites simply because it’s a balls-to-the-walls affair when it comes to picking off characters one by one. Sure, the writing outside the deaths isn’t the best, but when you see how much thought it put into some of these sequences, you can’t help but feel a little bit giddy, no matter how disturbed you feel afterwards. If pieces of shrapnel and airbags hadn’t made you weary of just about anything in this world, you’ll want to stay away from forklifts, home improvement stores, giant signs, and tanning beds. It goes without saying that this is one bloody movie.

Director James Wong (Final Destination) doesn’t skimp when it comes to knocking off characters in globs of blood, in fact several characters get sprayed on more than one occasion in a visceral rain shower of bits of brain.

After Final Destination 3 opens with the customary, over-the-top disaster, the movie does sink into a bit of a rut between deaths. The two “main” characters come up with an explanation too fast as to what is going on, presumably by a simple Google search. They also bite on the theory without any doubt in their minds which seems like the death scenes took too much of the writers time and they had to fill in the rest by making the remaining characters hyper-intelligent. Wendy (NAME), the girl who sees this all happen, is prone to crying at just about everything, and seems strangely comfortable with her position of identifying who’s next and how they will die.

Overall the rest of the film is, again, what you would expect for a cheaply made horror movie. The special effects are adequate, as the series has never been known for spending lots of money in this department. The acting is two dimensional for just about everyone as the characters are genre staples like the cool, confident jock, brainless girls, and the angry goth kids. You won’t find anything that breaks the genre barriers here, and by not expecting anything, this sits pretty comfortable with you.

Final Destination 3 is a fun movie to watch, and while it isn’t as good as the first or second films in the series, it still serves the audience well by giving them what they want, cool, innovate, and painful death scenes spliced in-between profanity, nudity, and sexual tension. Really, what more could you ask for on a Friday night at the movies?

Sequels in this day and age are lucky to have half the inspiration that made their predecessors worth a movie-goers time. Good sequels have always been few and far between, but over the last few years we’ve been cursed with atrocious sequels, let alone horror film sequels, that bring nothing to the table other than a way for the movie studios to make money.

Imagine my surprise when Saw II actually managed to be a good movie which only accentuated the fact that it was a good horror movie sequel.

Make no mistakes about it, Saw II was made to cash in on the success of the original, but never before have you seen a movie purely made for the money turn out so well in the end. Made on the cheap, just like the original, the film should make back its entire production and marketing budget in its opening week of release.

Saw II picks up right where the first film left off, well, some time has passed, but Jigsaw, the serial killer who never actually kills, is still building engineering marvels used to split skulls and disembody his victims. The film opens up with a Jigsaw related murder in the old-school, awe-inspiring type of death we used to see in the inventive 80’s. Jigsaw leaves a clue this time for Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Walhberg) to find him, which he does. What Matthews only comes to realize, after finding Jigsaw, is that several people have been locked into a house and a deadly nerve agent is floating in the air. They have two hours to live, but some of them won’t make it that long.

Writers Darren Lynn Bousman and Leigh Whannell have really outdone themselves with this smart sequel by topping the killing games of the original. Whereas Saw featured two men chained inside a decrepit bathroom and told of the history of the killer via Danny Glover’s character, Saw II puts us right in the middle of the “games.” The cast is composed of mostly throwaway characters who will only serve as canon fodder throughout the film. We aren’t introduced to many of them, and for good reason, within an hour most of them are dead.

Aside from the no-name cast, sans Franky G (Johnny Zero, The Italian Job) and Beverly Mitchell (7^th Heaven), Saw II suffers badly from horribly-cliché-ridden dialog and awful delivery. The character’s aren’t anything but standard 2D cut-outs of other seen in many movies over the year, but it’s the over-arching story and a perplexingly smart killer that gives Saw II its edge.

Much has been said about Saw II‘s ending and how some believe it to be contrived only to further the series as a money-making option for Lion’s Gate and others, such as myself, thought it was very well done, but on the border of being cringe worthy. You certainly don’t see it coming, but if anything, the film leaves you guessing like a good episode of 24, always thinking that no everyone is what they seem and there’s more to the picture than what you can see.

Where The Ring Two felt it necessary to merely tread water on the familiar ground of the series, Saw II seems to be very content with reinventing itself in each subsequent sequel. Hopefully though, unlike Friday the 13^th before it, this series doesn’t approach things too outlandishly to the point where you drive away your core audience (anyone remember the “thrilling” climax of Jason Takes Manhattan?).

Sure it was made for the money and had some lofty shoes to live up to, but Saw II may be one of the most surprising hits of the year because it had virtually nothing going for it other than the installed base of the horror genre and managed to surprise a lot of people, myself included.

Is it a spectacular horror film? No, but it sure is a darn good time at the movies, and a Halloween weekend well spent, plus, based on its early success, we have Saw III to look forward to next year, even if it is only for the money.