House of the Dead, 2003

House of the Dead is a 2003 action horror film directed by Uwe Boll, from a screenplay by Dave Parker and Mark Altman. Based on The House of the Dead video game franchise, it stars Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Clint Howard, Ona Grauer, Ellie Cornell, and Jürgen Prochnow. The film takes place on a fictional island infested by zombies, forcing survivors to fight their way off. Not a direct adaptation of the individual entries, Boll described the film as a prequel to the original 1996 game. House of the Dead was Boll's first film to be released theatrically, in addition to his first video game adaptation.

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PLOT

After booking a boat trip to attend a rave on an island located off the coast of Seattle named "Isla del Morte" ("Island of Death"), two college students, Simon and Greg meet up with three girls: Alicia, Karma, and Greg's girlfriend Cynthia. The five arrive to the dock late and the boat that is supposed to take them to Isla del Morte has already left. Victor Kirk, a boat captain, and his first mate Salish agree to ferry them despite knowing the location when they are offered a huge sum of money to leave fast rather than be inspected.

Arriving at Isla del Morte, they find the rave site ransacked and deserted. Alicia, Karma and Simon leave the site to go find anybody around while Cynthia and Greg stay behind. As Greg and Cynthia are about to engage in sex in a tent, the former leaves to urinate. Alone in the tent, Cynthia is killed by a group of zombies. Meanwhile, Alicia, Karma and Simon find a derelict house and as they attempt to investigate the place, they discover Alicia's ex-boyfriend Rudy, Hugh, and rave dancer Liberty, who inform them of a zombie attack during the event. 

The six leave the house to fetch Greg and Cynthia. Meanwhile, the zombies kill Salish when he is alone in the forest.

Alicia, Rudy, Karma, Simon, Liberty and Hugh return to the rave site where they find Greg. A zombified Cynthia comes out from behind a tree and kills Hugh but is killed when Casper, a Coast Guard officer who was tracking Kirk, arrives and shoots her. They form a plan to return to Kirk's boat and leave the island. When they return to the beach they find zombies on Kirk's boat. Casper and Greg leave the group to go find help, but Greg is killed in the forest.

Kirk reveals the island's history; Isla del Morte was home to Castillo Sermano, a Spanish Catholic priest that was banished from Spain in the 15th century for his dark experiments, which the Catholic Church forbade. Castillo murdered the crew of St. Cristobal, the ship that was taking him to the island, enslaved the island's natives, and murdered anyone who visited the place. He then created an immortality serum which he injected himself with, allowing him to live forever and return dead souls to life and support his cause. Kirk leads the group to a spot in the forest where he has hidden a box full of guns and weaponry. Once everyone is armed, they decide to head back to the house only to find the courtyard filled with zombies. Liberty and Casper are killed in the ensuing fight and Alicia, Rudy, Kirk, Karma and Simon manage to take shelter inside the house.

When Kirk is alone, he hears Salish whistling outside. He goes outside and sees Salish now zombified. Kirk sacrifices himself by killing Salish and a bunch of zombies with a stick of dynamite, but the explosion also blows up the entrance to the house. The remaining four lock themselves in a lab inside the house, but the zombies break in. Karma finds a hatch in the floor which she, Alicia and Rudy use to escape. Simon sacrifices himself to kill the zombies by shooting a barrel of gunpowder, blowing up the house and the zombies. Alicia, Rudy and Karma find themselves in tunnels. They make their way through the tunnels, but Karma is killed by zombies as she attempts to hold them off as Rudy and Alicia flee.

Alicia and Rudy are aided out of the tunnels by a mysterious man wearing Greg's face as a mask.

 The man is revealed to be Castillo Sermano, who then orders a horde of zombies to restrain Alicia and Rudy in an attempt to kill them and use their flesh for his own purposes. Alicia and Rudy escape Castillo, blowing the tunnels up in the process. Castillo manages to survive the explosion and Alicia gets into a sword fight with him. Castillo impales her heart, and Rudy manages to decapitate him soon after. However, the still-alive headless body of Castillo begins to strangle Rudy.

 Alicia, who is barely alive, gets up and crushes the head under her foot, which finally kills him. Although Alicia seemingly dies, she and Rudy are rescued by a team of agents. When the agents ask Rudy to identify himself, he reveals his last name is Curien. The ending narration reveals that Rudy gave Alicia the immortality serum, and they return to Seattle.

The movie is super interesting. 

Rating: 10 Stars

The City of the Dead, 1960 (Learn how to fight the Witches- People who made Pact with the Devil.)

The City of the Dead (U.S. title: Horror Hotel) is a 1960 supernatural horror film directed by John Llewellyn Moxey and starring Christopher Lee, Venetia Stevenson, Betta St. John, Patricia Jessel and Valentine Dyall. The film marks the directorial debut of Moxey.[4] It was produced in the United Kingdom but set in America, and the British actors were required to speak with North American accents throughout.

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In 1692 in fictional Whitewood, Massachusetts, a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn is burned at the stake. Before her death, Selwyn and her accomplice, Jethrow Keane, sold their souls to Lucifer for eternal life and revenge on Whitewood in return for providing the Devil with two yearly virgin human sacrifices on the Hour of Thirteen during Candlemas Eve and the Witches' Sabbath.

In the present day, following his lecture on witchcraft, a university history professor, Alan Driscoll, advises an interested student named Nan Barlow to visit Whitewood during her vacation to slake her interest in witchcraft by studying Whitewood's history. Nan settles in The Raven's Inn, a hotel owned by eccentric Mrs. Newless, becoming acquainted with the only normal-seeming local resident Patricia Russell, who loans her a book on witchcraft. Reading the book, Nan learns that this night is Candlemas Eve.

She is lured down to the basement and is restrained on a satanic altar by Mrs. Newless and members of her coven. Mrs. Newless reveals herself to be Elizabeth Selwyn before proceeding to sacrifice Nan.

Two weeks later, Nan's concerned fiancé, Bill Maitland, and her brother, Richard, learn The Raven's Inn does not exist in any phone directory. They are visited by Patricia, who is also concerned with Nan's disappearance. The men travel separately to Whitewood, and Bill barely survives a car crash caused by an apparition of Selwyn.

Richard reaches Whitewood and meets up with Patricia before visiting her grandfather, Reverend Russell, who reveals that Whitewood is under the control of Selwyn's coven. 

Soon after, Patricia is kidnapped as the coven's sacrifice, and Richard attempts to save her before they are cornered in the graveyard. Professor Driscoll is revealed to be a coven member. A severely-injured Bill arrives at the last minute and succeeds in extricating a large wooden cross from the ground. After being gravely wounded by Selwyn, Bill uses the last of his strength to burn the coven members alive under the cross's shadow. Selwyn escapes during the chaos. Her pact with the Devil has been undone by the intervention, and Richard and Patricia find her charred corpse in the hotel which was earlier revealed to have been built on the site of her burning.

RATING: 10 STARS

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, 2005

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (also known as Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave from the Grave) is a 2005 made-for-television action horror film directed by Ellory Elkayem and starring Aimee-Lynn Chadwick, Cory Hardrict, John Keefe, Jenny Mollen, and Peter Coyote.

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PLOT

The film opens with Charles Garrison arriving at a mortuary with a canister of Trioxin. He is greeted by a team of Interpol agents whose goal is to destroy the last of the canisters to avoid another incident. Nevertheless, one of them sprays three corpses with the gas, and revives them. Charles is killed during the incident, along with the mortuary owner and one of the government officials.

It's Halloween, and Jenny with Julian, Cody and Becky, the last three survivors of the previous film, are now in college and they receive notice of the "murder" of Charles. Julian and Jenny go to search for and possibly sell what belonged to Charles, and they find the last two barrels of Trioxin. One of them is taken to Cody, who tests the chemical inside it. Jeremy, Jenny's brother, tastes the chemical when he thinks that it is a drug similar to ecstasy, but he goes into a spasm, in which he foams at the mouth, and later describes what it was like. The chemical is named "Z" for its zombie-like effect on the living.

Cody, Jeremy and Shelby extract the chemical from the canister and they put the liquid extract into pills which they sell to Skeet, so he can sell the drug around the school. While Skeet informs everyone to only take one pill at a time for health reasons, most take more than one pill at a time which speeds up the process that causes humans to reanimate as zombies.

Gino and Aldo Serra, the only survivors from the beginning of the movie, recognize what is going on when they are shown the severed head of one of the zombies, and they go to question Julian, knowing that he is familiar with Trioxin, but he does not tell them anything of the canisters that he and Jenny discovered. Sometime later, people are turning into zombies, and the drug is being passed around a rave and getting out of control, Cody and Shelby are killed. Jenny kills Zombie Jeremy. 

Seeing no other option, Aldo calls in military assistance, but he is told that an American bomber plane is already on the way to the ravelocation. The plane launches a bomb which detonates in the center of the rave. Jenny and Julian emerge from the rubble alive and Aldo asks where’s Gino and tries to find him. It is unclear if Gino died during the blast. At the end of the film, the Tarman desperately tries to hitchhike a ride to the party, but to no avail. After scaring away a woman who almost gave him a ride, he has no choice but to walk to the party, yelling his trademark "Brains!" as he goes to the party.

Rating: 10 Stars

Red Dot, 2024

Red Dot is a 2021 Swedish drama thriller film written by Alain Darborg with Per Dickson and directed by Alain Darborg. The film stars Nanna Blondell, Anastasios Soulis, Thomas Hanzon, Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Kalled Mustonen and Tomas Bergström. It premiered on Netflix on February 11, 2021.

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PLOT

After his university graduation ceremony, David (Anastasios Soulis) publicly and awkwardly proposes to his girlfriend, Nadja (Nanna Blondell), which she happily accepts. A year and a half later, however, they are stressed due to work and school and fight frequently in their apartment in Stockholm. The stress is compounded when Nadja learns that she is pregnant, which she is unhappy about as she is studying to be a doctor and she is not sure if she and David should be parents. She decides to keep it a secret from David. Nadja opens up to an older neighbor, Tomas (Thomas Hanzon), and he assures her that she and David will be great parents; he insists that parenthood is life's greatest gift and implies he has lost a child of his own. The next morning, David surprises Nadja with a camping trip to see the northern lights, and the two reconcile and take the trip with their dog, Boris. While stopping for gas, David encounters two locals, brothers Jarmo and Rolle, and is made uncomfortable by their rough mannerisms and their truck bed full of dead game. As he has difficulties taking his car out of park, he accidentally bumps into the brothers' truck, leaving scratches. David chooses to drive off instead of saying something, which annoys Nadja. When they reach their destination at an inn, the woman at the front desk treats them strangely and silently refuses to serve them, leaving her brother Einar to imply that she's not used to seeing an interracial couple. He learns of their itinerary and offers to host them at his cabin in the wilderness. Nadja becomes nervous seeing Jarmo and Rolle in the establishment, and when they leave, they discover that someone has keyed their car and vandalized their bumper sticker with a racial epithet. Angered by this, Nadja spots their pickup truck later on the drive and scratches it with a screwdriver, narrowly avoiding retaliation when the brothers catch her in the act.

The couple camps beneath the northern lights, and Nadja reveals she is pregnant, which makes David nervous and unsure. Their conversation is interrupted when they spot a red dot on the wall of their tent. They first assume that it is a laser pointer prank, but quickly realize that is a laser sight from a rifle and guess that the brothers are attacking them in revenge for the car damage. Boris escapes into the wilderness while they try to hide, and they hear gunshots and the sound of Boris whining. After they are shot at, they flee into the forest and hear their pursuers chase after them. After spending the night hiding in a small shelter, they return to the bloodied campsite and find all their belongings missing, and Boris's severed head in the tent. While searching for any remaining possessions, David is injured when his arm gets caught in a hunting trap. Finding nothing to help them, they set off to find help. However, they are soon shot at again, and David, increasingly losing blood, hallucinates a boy in a winter coat staring at them. David is shot in the shoulder while Nadja escapes unhurt, and the two search for each other as a snowstorm sets in. Nadja realizes that she has run atop a frozen lake, and as David searches for her, he falls in and is narrowly rescued by her. The couple finally makes it to an emergency cabin, where they phone rescuers and are told they will have to wait until the storm passes for help.

The next morning, they hear a vehicle approach the cabin and realize it is an armed (but unaware) Jarmo, who works as a mountain rescuer. Escaping through a back window, they flee into the woods and seek shelter in what is revealed to be the den of a hibernating bear. Jarmo discovers them, but before he can shoot, Nadja shoots him with a flare found at the cabin. David's condition deteriorates as they progress, and he hallucinates the boy again and begins mumbling about guilt. Spotting Einar's cabin in the distance, Nadja runs ahead to get help for David, but encounters Rolle on the way. Rolle seems confused by her appearance, but before he can act, David knocks him unconscious with a rock, and the two make it to Einar's cabin. Einar appears to call for help, but Nadja realizes that he is contacting someone else, and Einar suddenly becomes aggressive and locks them in a room discovered to be covered in stealth photographs taken of the couple.

Finally, Tomas arrives with a rifle, and the truth is revealed: the day of the couple's engagement, Nadja attempted to perform oral sex on David as they drove home, and a distracted David struck and killed a pedestrian -- the boy he had hallucinated earlier, who was also Tomas's son and Einar's nephew. David chose to drive off instead of calling the police as Nadja wanted, which left her wracked with guilt. On that day, Tomas had been playing with a drone with his son, which had caused him to run into the road; however, the drone also captured the couple's license plate, and a grieving Tomas tracked them down and moved into a nearby apartment to surveil them. Tomas is intent on inflicting revenge on the couple for callously driving away and had been behind the earlier murder attempts. He now decides to become more sadistic and tries to get David to use a power drill to torture and kill Nadja's child, and he shoots David in the knee when he does not comply. Tomas prepares to kill them both but is interrupted by the arrival of a furious Jarmo, who has tracked down the couple. In the confusion, Tomas shoots and fatally wounds Jarmo, who accidentally does the same to Einar, and Nadja and David escape while Jarmo and Tomas struggle for a rifle.

Nadja and David attempt to flee, but David cannot escape with his injuries. He tells Nadja to run, and when she stumbles upon the unconscious Rolle, she decides to take his rifle and save David. However, when she returns, she hesitates while trying to shoot him and is shot in the head and killed instantly by Mona, Tomas's wife and Einar's sister encountered earlier at the inn. A traumatized David begs to be killed as well, but Tomas refuses, telling him that he can now understand how he felt after his own son had died. Mona and Tomas depart as David is left sobbing in the snow.

Rating: 10 Stars

Colors of Evil: Red" 2024

 

When a girl's body is found on a beach, a prosecutor teams up with the victim's mother on an impassioned quest for the truth.

Colors of Evil: Red" is a Polish film that premiered on Netflix on May 29, 2024. Directed by acclaimed director Adrian Panek, it follows the story of a prosecutor named Leopold Bilski (played by Jakub Gierszał. The film is based on the popular Polish book of the same name, Kolory Zła: Czerwień by Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak.

In the movie, a Tri-City beach becomes the scene of a dramatic discovery when the sea washes up the body of a young girl. The victim's unusual mutilation points to murder. Prosecutor Leopold Bilski, an ambitious and tenacious investigator, leads the investigation. The victim's mother, Judge Helena Bogucka, is also involved in the case. As they follow the clues, they uncover a connection to a murder from 15 years ago, leading them to one of the seaside clubs. The investigation reveals the dark face of the criminal underworld in the Tri-City area, much to the discomfort of the local police.

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Rating: 10 Stars