Review of 200 M.P.H. (2011)

200 M.P.H. (2011) is a straight-to-video action/sports/drama movie by The Asylum, a film company specializing primarily in mockbusters.

Directed by Cole S. McKay (Star Hunter (1996), 3 Musketeers (2011)).

Written by Thunder Levin (Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood! (2008), American Warship (2012)).

Starring: Jaz Martin, Hennely Jimenez, Darren Anthony Thomas, Paul Logan, AnnaMaria Demara, Tommy Nash, Janet Tracy Keijser and others.

So here’s The Asylum trying their luck in recreating the magic of the Fast & Furious series. Great, a bad knock-off of movies that I really don’t like in the first place.

A guy parks in a driveway and his brother comes out and says „it’s like an 80,000 dollar car”, no, please be more specific and then he proceeds to list exact specifics of the car. This happens a lot, if a character knows shit about cars, he better list some specs from Wikipedia. This doesn’t make the guys look cool at all, they seem more like nerds. They are less the guy with a greasy engine in his hand and more the guy telling you Star Trek trivia.

I don’t know shit about cars, so I relied on this movie to educate me. Now I know that I would be considered a cool person if my car could do „0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds”. I am willing to bet half of the shit they’re saying is total rubbish.

Ok, so finally we get to some racing. What’s going on? Why is it on fast forward? Oh, god, no, they sped up the footage. They could’ve put it in at normal speed and put like a little note to pop up on screen, that says „now use fast forward x2, because we didn’t know we were supposed to shoot at lower framerate”.

The characters are something. Our main guy is… well… uh, if you found Paul Walker bland, you haven’t seen this guy. His mother is a stripper, but you know who else is a stripper? His girlfriend. Yeah, talk about Oedipal syndrome, huh? At one point he walks into a strip-club and his mother just greets him topless and he’s like „geez, mom”, like it’s some kind of twisted sitcom called „Mom’s a Stripper!” There’s also this corrupt cop, spouting macho lines like „Did I stutter?” and homoerotic poetry like „No, this is me, the man with your balls in my hand!”, which sort of left me feeling unsure if it was meant as a metaphor. Then there’s a chick who does her best Michelle Rodriguez, which made me cringe. I like my Michelle Rodriguez done by Michelle Rodriguez.

No Asylum movie is complete without bad CGI, so here we get a CG car crash. So the main guy’s brother dies during a race and you know what? Boo-fucking-hoo, should I really feel sorry for an illegal street-racer dying? You go out at night and drive like a madman with you’re douchy sports-car, you’re kind of asking for it. The only reason why I felt a bit sorry, was because he was the only character, that I didn’t hate,

At one point a chick crashes her motorbike off-screen, does a roll on the ground and just keeps running. That’s some Catwoman trick right there. The car chases are at times pretty decent, but then they’re destroyed by some sped-up shots and cut-aways to CG-cars.  I must also mention a scene, where the corrupt cop is chasing the main guy, suddenly there’s a CG helicopter after those two cars and it’s not even in the air, it’s like 10 meters of the ground and then it disappears and is never refered to.

This movie is shit, which I totally didn’t expect from a movie produced by The Asylum, directed by some stunt-man and written by a guy, who’s  name is Thunder. Sounded like this is going to be some quality material.

Overall, this is one of the worst The Asylum movies I’ve  seen, it has its over-the-top moments, that are unintentionally hilarious, but mostly it just drags. I hated it, not recommended.

Pictured: A review from Rotten Tomatoes, which is written by a guy, who sounds like every character from this movie. A dorky douchebag.

Review of Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

Hellraiser: Deader (2005) is a straight-to-video mystery/thriller/horror film and the seventh film in the Hellraiser film franchise.

Directed by Rick Bota (Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), Harper’s Island (2009 TV)).

Written by Benjamin Carr (Super Hybrid (2010), Zarkorr! The Invader (1996)) and Tim Day (Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)).

Starring: Kari Wuhrer, Paul Rhys Doug Bradley, Marc Warren, Georgina Rylance, Simon Kunz and others.

We open up to  some chick waking up in a crack-den, then just walking out. Turns out she’s a well-known journalist. Obviously not well-known amongst crack-heads. She goes to some office and her boss shows her a snuff film of sorts, where a chick shoots herself in the head and then comes back to life. The journalist says “tell me it’s some kind of special effect”, but then, of course, she instantly abandons this idea and goes to Romania to investigate.

During her investigation she gets her hands on the puzzle box and soon bad shit starts happening, mostly to the viewer of this film. We are once again subjected to pointless hallucination/dream sequences, as she tries to find out more about this cultist sect called “deaders”.

She visits some guy who gives her various information, which he has acquired by being a leader of a gang that is an insult to Romania’s subway system. Because there is a whole metro train, he and other subculture euro-trash people are living in. I suppose you can have your own train, if you keep up with the schedule. However, it compliments the educational system by having everyone in Romania speak good English.

At first I thought that the movie was going for a certain tone, but then I realised that the tone is created by the combined blandness of digital video and a boring script.

It seems Rick Bota had chosen to make the Hellraiser series about people seeing things and nothing actually happening, because the previous one was like that, this one is like that and the next one is in a way also like that. Why did they let him do three movies? Why can’t they write scripts for the series and not rewrite unrelated ones? Why?

There is one cool scene, where a character wakes up in the night, to find a knife stuck in her back and tries to get it out. That was the only interesting scene in the whole movie. Pinhead appears a couple of times and delivers some words of wisdom and I was grateful that at least they didn’t make him the villain.

Overall, there’s some flashes of interesting choices, but it doesn’t hide it being a total mess, it’s really bad. Not recommended.

“Ahh! It sucks that I can’t bend my neck, otherwise I could just let these chains slip over my head!”

Review of Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) is a straight-to-video thriller/mystery/horror film and the sixth film in the Hellraiser film franchise.

Directed by Rick Bota (Hellraiser: Deader (2005), Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)).

Written by Carl V. Dupre (Detroit Rock City (1999), The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000)) and Tim Day (Hellraiser: Deader (2005), Roulette (2003 Short)).

Starring: Dean Winters, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley, Trevor White, Rachel Hayward, Michael Rogers and others.

The movie starts and we see that Ashley Laurence is back, that’s great, Hellraiser was at its best with her. She is in a car with her husband and they crash into the water. Why? Because they start kissing while driving a car, that’s not an accident, that’s suicide. Laurence drowns.

You start thinking „Oh, it’s a dream, no way they would just use her for five minutes and then her character dies. Right?” Wrong. During the whole movie she appears for like 10 minutes total.

After the crash, the husband wakes up in the hospital, gets sedated, wakes up during a brain surgery and then wakes up again, so the brain surgery was a dream. Or was it? It’s less than 10 minutes into the movie and I’m already confused, a great sign.

What is cool about the movie, is that it looks like it’s shot in the early 90’s and except for the scenes in the office, where the guy works, there’s not much that would make it seem like it’s not. Ok, there’s a CG eel that crawls out of the guy’s mouth at one point, but the CG is bad enough to not disrupt the 90’s feel.

Then this guy starts getting hallucinations every couple of minutes, so if anything weird happens, I instantly doubt if that’s real. And as the movie goes on it gets even more fucking confusing. 30 minutes into the movie, the guy just wakes up at work and I’m not sure if I’m just thrown back to the last time I saw him at work, like 15 minutes ago.  Did I just spend 15 minutes watching him dreaming?

You gradually understand that our hero is a cheating bastard and, as we know, in Hellraiser movies these don’t have the best of fates. Even more, the guy is just this total asshole and the only reason you sympathise with him, is that you’re forced to, since everyone around him are even bigger assholes.

Seriously, the movie is so fractured that when at one point the guy wakes up from a hallucination that turns into a dream, from which he wakes up to have another hallucination, I just gave up and stopped caring. How am I supposed to feel any suspense when I know that the movie spends a minute in reality and then it sinks into five minutes of some nightmare jumpscare world.  All the scene transitions are him waking up.

However, for an unrelated script, just like Inferno, this does play on the pleasure/lust/whatever else aspect of the series and the tone is even more similar to Inferno than the previous ones, but it’s still ridiculously hard to watch. It’s a psychological thriller both for the main character and the viewer trying to make sense of this mess.

Pinhead and some cenobites do appear briefly, but they’re both unimpressive and unimportant. Just thrown in there. Ashley Laurence appears again at the end in a plot twist, that isn’t awful, but I just didn’t care at that point.

Overall, visually decent, but terribly annoying to watch. It’s torture on your brain that is used to more or less cohesive films. It’s a stupid movie, not recommended.

Pictured: The influence of Hentai on Hollywood(‘s straight-to-video section).

Review of Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) is a straight to video mystery/thriller/horror film and the fifth film in the Hellraiser film franchise.

Directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)).

Written by Paul Harris Boardman (Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)) and Scott Derrickson (Land of Plenty (2004), Sinister (2012)).

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro, Doug Bradley, James Remar, Nicholas Sadler, Lindsay Taylor and others.

With this one the Hellraiser series dropped into the almost guaranteed shittiness, that the straight-to-video format brings. However, sometimes horror movies benefit from the lack of restraints of theatrical releases. Is it the case with this one? Yes and no.

We follow a crooked cop, who snorts coke and is good at chess. A three-dimensional character if there ever was one. He goes to a crime scene where a guy is ripped apart. He is not as familiar with a scene like that as we are. Of course there’s the puzzle box somewhere lying around.

The cop goes home and he has a wife and a young daughter. Oh, he’s a family man, that’s nice. Then he leaves and fucks a prostitute in a motel room. Him being this total sleazebag helps to create this mood of dreariness, lust, perversion. After banging the hooker, the bad lieutenant goes into the bathroom and opens the box.

I don’t get why every time the box works differently. This time the Pinhead doesn’t instantly come, he’s transported to a weird house, where there’s some cenobite chicks, and the upper  body half version of Chatterer. The cenobite effects are really good, they look creepy. He runs into Pinhead and… wakes up on the bathroom floor.

From then on various shit starts happening to the cop. People he knows start dying and by their dead bodies fingers of a child are left. He must investigate, because that’s what he does. That and being a dick.

Craig Sheffer is really good as the cop, you feel him slowly descending into paranoia and madness and his untrustworthy face is suited for the role, because he’s a good guy, who is also a total asshole. James Remar has an interesting role as a priest/psychiatrist.

Here the tone of the series also shifted dramatically, it’s not so much a horror movie, than a psychological thriller, although, both of the terms are kind of loose and often interchangeable. I didn’t mind it much, because at least this dark thriller encapsulates the themes of rage, sex, pain, pleasure and nightmares a lot better than Bloodline or even Hell On Earth. Also at some parts the detective starts talking in voice over, so the movie feels like film noir.

People have complained that Pinhead barely appears, but come on, he’s not a slasher movie villain, he’s this mysterious figure who does what he is told and not some one-liner whore. He is basically an angel of death, just a messenger.

There’s a peculiar scene, where the cop sees various people attacking him and one of them is his partner, who repeats „I trusted you!” and throws knives at him. Guess where he gets the knives from? His back! Clever or cheesy? I think both. The ending is really cool, although, a bit predictable.

It doesn’t feel like a Hellraiser movie, but for an unrelated script, it certainly hits most of the right themes and offers a lot more satisfying use of the mythos than the previous two movies.

Overall, a very atmospheric thriller, I enjoyed it quite a bit, definitely my favourite Hellraiser sequel, although Hellraiser II is very close. Recommended.

“Ah, yes, that’s the spot, yeah, scratch it, look, my leg is shaking!”