Here, Now – Ok, got another book for you. In preparation for our reviews rebirth, I went on Amazon and bought a few popular books for my Kindle in the thriller genre. TRIAL JUNKIES, a legalish crime thriller by Robert Gregory Browne, was high on the bestsellers list and my first pick.
Here’s the Goodreads synopsis:
“Ethan “Hutch” Hutchinson hasn’t seen his old college pals in nearly ten years. Now fate has brought them together again as one of the gang is put on trial for a brutal, senseless murder. The Chicago police and prosecutor think they have their perp, but Hutch isn’t about to sit silently in a courtroom as someone he cares about is wrongfully convicted. When Hutch and his friends join forces to search for the real killer, what they find shatters every notion they have about friendship, loss and redemption, and may very well cost Hutch—and the woman he loves—their lives.”
Sounded decent, the reviews were good and the price was cheap. Three criteria I look for when trying out prostitutes or books from authors I have never been exposed to.…
Continue Reading
I know we deal with some nasty crimes, so watching a film depicting a violent home invasion in a realistic manner may not be something you’re inclined to watch while escaping the crap you read on here. But if you’re a glutton for punishment, boy do I have a film for you.
Kidnapped is a Spanish home invasion film directed by Miguel Ángel Vivas that echoes a bit of the original Funny Games, The Strangers, or more recently, Cherry Tree Lane. But unlike those films, Vivas seems to abandon any form of social commentary or cheap scares, simply turning those who choose to watch into a neutered witness to a horrific crime.
Jaime (Fernando Cayo), his wife Marta (Ana Wagener) and their teenage daughter Isa (Manuela Vellés) have just moved into their new home located in a gated community when, on their first night there, three masked men break in and hold them hostage.
Their motive is money. and they plan on getting it by forcing Jaime to accompany the gang’s leader around town and empty out his bank accounts at various ATMs.…
Continue Reading
It was pointed out to me that I have been real slack on movie suggestions lately, leading the two people who actually take my movie advice to believe that I have not watched any films worth a crap. This is not true. In fact, I have watched a number of good movies this year worthy of a D’D reader’s time.
So while I wait for someone to do something stupid enough for me to write about, I figure I would tell you about one I watched earlier this year — a revenge film titled RED WHITE & BLUE. This slow burner is so bleak and unpleasant that I absolutely love it to pieces. Here is the plot, taken from their Facebook Page.
“Set in Austin, Texas, this “slacker revenge movie” follows the disaffected and promiscuous Erica (Amanda Fuller – Buffy The Vampire Slayer) as she sleeps with a series of nameless men, until she is befriended by Nate (Noah Taylor – Submarine, The Proposition), an ex-Iraq war veteran with a sociopathic streak.
Nate, unusually, seems interested in Erica for more than just sex – but when one of her previous partners, hard-rocking mamma’s boy Franki (Marc Senter) resurfaces, Erica’s actions come back to haunt her, leading to a terrifying climax which has shocked audiences worldwide.…
Continue ReadingThe Cracked Spine: Tom Franklin’s “Crooked Letter Crooked Letter”
October 21, 2011 at 3:29 pm by Morbid
Here’s another book recommendation for you. I already missed one day and if I go two days without telling you all about a good book or movie, then it’s all over with. This would just hurt you ’cause if I recommend it, then it’s worth checking out. That’s a fact.
Today’s suggestion is Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin. I’ve never read anything from the guy, but his book was high on the Amazon must-read list, and the synopsis sounded promising:
“In the 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas “32″ Jones were boyhood pals in a small town in rural Mississippi. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry was the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, black single mother. But then Larry took a girl to a drive-in movie and she was never seen or heard from again. He never confessed . . . and was never charged.
More than twenty years have passed. Larry lives a solitary, shunned existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion.…
Continue Reading
I’m back with another Netflix Watch Instantly recommendation titled NAKED FEAR. Yeah, I know it sounds like a Steven Seagal movie, but this Canadian thriller starring Joe Mantegna (before his CRIMINAL MINDS stint) and a very naked Danielle De Luca, turned out being a pretty decent flick — if you skip the first 45 minutes.
A small town girl is forced to strip in a New Mexico shit-hole that also happens to be an active serial killer’s stomping grounds. A serial killer whose modus operandi is abducting prostitutes, then setting them free in the wilderness where he hunts them down like animals.
The film is based loosely off of American serial killer, Robert Hansen, who would hunt down prostitutes he’d abducted and set free into the Alaskan wilderness. This is one of the reasons why I even gave this film a shot and the fact that it’s directed by Thom Eberhardt, the man behind one of my guilty pleasures, 1984′s NIGHT OF THE COMET. Check out the trailer followed by a bit of my blurb-free rambling.…
Continue Reading
God knows we’ve ran the gamut of pervy landlords here at D’D. From the ones who lounge naked in their tenants’ homes, to the ones who rape their tenants’ dogs, and everything in between. So I figured I’d check out THE RESIDENT in hopes that they could successfully illicit that skeevy feeling you get when reading those real-life incidents…then gleefully recommend it to Jaded since she harbors an unnatural fear of peephole cameras in her toilet.
Jaded ended up liking it more than I did and wasn’t nearly as freaked out as I’d hoped. Some of this was because some of our articles dealing with this subject matter are creepier than this movie, as well as the fact that Jaded really dug the antagonist, not caring if she woke up in the middle of the night with him sucking on her fingers.
After her long-time boyfriend cheats on her, Dr. Juliet Dermer (Hilary Swank) moves out and finds the impossible — a roomy New York City loft with a great view, priced well below market value. The icing on the cake is that her new landlord Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is easy on the eyes and a perfect candidate for some rebound sex.…
Continue Reading
I’ve been a big fan of Asian cinema since I was in high school, primarily martial arts flicks and assorted Japanese weirdness, after all, what genre junkie isn’t into those? What’s really caught my attention in the past few years are the films coming out of South Korea, especially the crime films.
Some of you may be aware of Park Chan-Wook‘s Vengeance Trilogy – comprised of SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE , OLDBOY , and LADY VENGEANCE – and while great in its own right, is not the be-all-end-all of crime cinema from Korea. There have been perhaps a dozen similar films released since The Vengeance Trilogy’s reign worth noting; one of them being last year’s criminally underseen THE MAN FROM NOWHERE.
I’m not going to bother going into too much detail regarding the plot as that’s not the purpose of this review. What I will tell you is that it involves certain plot elements that I refer to as the holy trinity of a well rounded crime film; drug trafficking, gang presence and copious organ removal.…
Continue Reading
Jaume Collet-Serra is back with a movie almost less plausible than his ORPHAN flick (our review) but luckily a tad more entertaining. UNKNOWN is a paranoid thriller starring Liam Neeson as Dr. Martin Harris, an American botanist in Berlin with his wife (the lifeless but beautiful January Jones) to speak at a global biotech summit.
Before he is able to check into his room, he realizes he’s left his briefcase at the airport and leaves his wife behind to retrieve it. On the way, the cab he is in, driven by Gina (the squandered Diane Kruger), is involved in an accident that plunges the taxi into a river. Gina is able to pull Dr. Harris from the sinking cab, but he falls into a coma.
When he wakes up four days later, his memory is a bit sketchy, but he quickly makes his way back to the hotel to reunite with his wife. But she has no idea who he is when he finds her, and even introduces him to her husband, the real Dr.…
Continue Reading
Okay, I’ve reviewed two crappy horror films, so here’s one to make up for that and then some. I had read a bit about this Australian horror film last year when it was making the rounds at all the film festivals I’m not worthy of being invited to. I heard it was a mix of old and new horror that was a tad similar to Peter Jackson’s splatter days before LORD OF THE RINGS. “That’s great,” I thought, but I didn’t really get my interest piqued until EFX Magazine described THE LOVED ONES as WOLF CREEK meets PRETTY IN PINK. Now, I still don’t know who the hell EFX Magazine is, but you have to admit that the combination of those two films is pretty interesting. Well, almost a year after all those other sites got to see the film, I was finally able to watch THE LOVED ONES the other night, and, yeah, EFX Magazine’s description is a pretty accurate one and I loved it. Check out the trailer that reveals a tad too much and then my thoughts on this sometimes intense, occasionally sick flick whose humor is consistently dark as pitch.…
Continue Reading
I became interested in this film back when I read the synopsis while checking out movies playing at the 2010 SLAMDANCE film festival, where it would win the Audience Award. It deals with the world of live action role-playing, or LARP, where players dress up as characters and then act them out, mostly in the fantasy setting. Not my kinda thing, but I admit I find the activity, and the people who play, interesting subject matter. The events in THE WILD HUNT take place over a weekend larping event, when Erik decides to crash the make-believe festivities to win back Evelyn, the girlfriend he feels he’s losing to the fantasy world of Norse myth. She was invited by Erik’s deadbeat brother, who currently only lives for the game, so she can play the major role of a Viking princess kidnapped by the rival Celtic shaman. She is to be sacrificed to start the Wild Hunt, a Celt ceremony that marks the beginning of the big battle that concludes the weekend’s game.…
Continue Reading
I just finished watching a film called SURVIVING CROOKED LAKE
Thought some of you may be interested in this new Canadian thriller from director Daniel Grou coming out in 2010. Especially considering the subject matter and the way discussions usually go here when talking about child killers. “Bruno Hamel is a thirty eight year-old surgeon. He lives in Drummondville with his wife Sylvie, and their eight year-old daughter Jasmine. Like many happy people, he is leading an uneventful life until a beautiful fall afternoon, when his daughter is raped and murdered. From then on, the world of the Hamel family collapses. When the murderer is arrested, a terrible project germinates in Bruno’s darkened mind. He plans to capture the “monster” (Martin Dubreuil) and make him pay for his crime. The day the murderer appears in Court, Hamel, who had prepared his plan in great detail, kidnaps the monster and later sends the police a brief message stating that the rapist and murderer of his daughter was going to be tortured for 7 days and then executed. Once this task accomplished, he will then give himself up.…
Continue Reading
The projectionist could’ve run this film backwards, and I don’t think I would’ve noticed. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is a Hollywood attempt to massage author Darren Shan’s 12-part saga of vampires and teenagers into a viable, cash-cow franchise. Spanning the first three novels, Assistant doesn’t tell a story as much as it hurls everything that isn’t nailed down against the wall to see what sticks. Labored and often tedious, the picture is a friendly stab at Burtonesque macabre antics, but director Paul Weitz is in way over his head trying to juggle huge portions of the grotesque and the epic. 16-year-old Darren (Chris Massoglia) is an average teen with good grades and a love for spiders. Finding a flyer for the Cirque du Freak sideshow, Darren decides to attend with impulsive best friend Steve (the limited Josh Hutcherson), finding …
Continue Reading
Many films register as forgettable. Whiteout is practically the definition of the word, not actually requiring a viewing to sense a distinct worthlessness to this cinematic endeavor. Purportedly based on a beloved 1998 graphic novel, this Antarctic thriller is a dreadful sleeping pill, marching into production with the best intentions in the world, but coming out the other side a jumbled, incompetent, ludicrously underlined whodunit. Stationed on a remote base on Antarctica, U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale, failing to hide her embarrassment) is looking forward to her last days patrolling a frozen wasteland. Riding out her final moments of duty with friends (Ton Skerritt, Columbus Short), dreaming of a warmer future, Carrie is instead pulled into a last-minute murder investigation when a body is discovered out in the middle of nowhere.…
Continue Reading
Andrea Barto (George Hilton) has had a run of bad luck lately. One of his female tenants in an apartment building he owns was brutally stabbed to death in the elevator. This event has left some units vacant and hard to fill so to counter-attack the ill effects a murder can have on a dwelling, Andrea decides to do some vanguard advertising. He finds a model willing to live in the building rent free. The plan being that when people find out a gorgeous model resides in the building, people will scramble to get in one of the remaining units. Unfortunately for Andrea, the model he picked is murdered shortly after moving into her new apartment, drowned in her bathtub. Undeterred by now having two murders tainting his building along with a possible serial killer, he offers a room to model Jennifer (the gorgeous Edwige Fenech) and her ditzy best friend Marilyn. However, on the first night in their new pad, Jennifer is accosted by a masked, gloved intruder who tries to strangle her but is scared off before completing the deed.…
Continue Reading
