Bovie Movie

Ripper 2: Letters From Within begins when Molly Keller, the last living descendant of the infamous Jack the Ripper, is sentenced to an insane asylum after some vicious murders. While there, she undergoes an experimental procedure that might cure her. Sadly, she begins to lose touch with the real world and her nefarious forefather might be able to use her to get back into the world.

A conflicted young woman haunted by a dark past is caught in the middle of a love triangle, and stalked by a demonic serial killer who only targets people she loves. To make matters worse, the suspects are her friends and she can trust no one. As the mystery unravels in her world of love, obsession and murder, ebony discovers that in order to stop the nightmare she will have to confront her past, and face the demons that torment her, or risk losing her own soul. In the end every broken heart is nothing but a Bleeding Rose..

John Travolta hoped to star in it to shatter his Grease image, and Elton John was even asked to turn it into a Broadway musical, but when this highly anticipated movie version of Anne Rice’s cult novel finally came to the screen it was a decidedly anaemic affair. All sumptuously dressed up with nowhere really interesting to go, director Neil Jordan’s lavish adaptation is a stylised horror tale that lacks the emotional depth and jet-black darkness of the doom-laden tome. Too many other similar ideas have since come down the undead path, seriously undermining this stark vision of the hellish torture of being cursed to live for ever. Still, Tom Cruise is fine as the vampire Lestat, whose close relationship with handsome Brad Pitt forms an erotic twist on the Dracula legend. Kirsten Dunst impresses as the child adopted by the pair, but it’s Antonio Banderas who gives the most full-blooded performance as the bisexual Armand. This is a beautifully mounted production that’s low on divine decadence and Rice’s celebrated charnel house morbidity, but high on glossy Grand Guignol and evocative elegance. 

You die on screen playing the prototype video game Staying Alive, then you prepare to meet the same bloody fate in real life. This is the premise of William Brent Bell’s predictable The Ring-goes-X Box chiller, which is set against the over-familiar horror landscape of New Orleans and centres on the quest of a group of friends to find the ancient evil that has possessed their consoles. That the police ignore the group’s crazy explanation despite clear evidence; that lovers make out amid the supernatural mayhem; and that characters utter lines such as “I can’t believe this is happening!”, only adds to the lame-brained, clichéd ennui. Pre-gore cutaways (to secure a wider audience) sink any shock value, while the sound effects — reliant on joystick controls buzzing like an electric razor — are lazy. Even the game’s computer graphics refuse to summon up the requisite gothic frisson. 

Marshall Lawson loses his strike-team in a cold-blooded and seemingly random attack. After this he takes it upon himself to investigate the suspicious circumstances of the brutal killings. Soon he uncovers CTX Majestic, a covert military operation so secret, that now the military wants Marshall eliminated. Resolute in his pursuit, Marshall engages in a merciless battle with a drug dealer operation that appears to be secretly funded by a rogue arm of the military.

Jim Caviezel follows up playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ with a role more suited to the old road warrior himself — a vengeful widower stalking the killer of his wife along dusty highways. His quarry (played by Colm Feore) kills women by running them over with his customised Cadillac El Dorado, as he is too severly disabled to carry out the killings with his own hands. The story begins well enough but then runs out of ideas and just trots out all the usual serial-killer clichés — doubly disappointing given the fact that director Robert Harmon made The Hitcher. The mayhem here is more bloodthirsty than chilling, while the vicious tone and tired execution of the film quickly become a turn-off. 

Waylon and Buddy decide to join the army as it appears to be their best option. But when they realize that they are part of a group that have been thrown into a medical experiment facility with a doctor who plans on turning them into ultimate killing machines, they must fight to destroy his other creations and save themselves.

Although Steven Spielberg ensures (as executive producer) that things don’t get too nasty, this remains a wonderfully anarchic affair that is probably one of Hollywood’s blackest mainstream hits. Zach Galligan plays the teenager who is given a cuddly exotic pet mogwai called Gizmo, but through carelessness unwittingly unleashes a viciously murderous swarm of little gremlins. There’s no doubt whose side director Joe Dante is on and he gleefully trashes the view of small-town America portrayed by feel-good movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life (which is being screened on TV throughout the tale). Film buffs will delight in all the in-jokes and the long list of cameos, ranging from Roger Corman veteran Dick Miller to Spielberg himself. And Phoebe Cates’s admirably straight-faced Christmas speech should be compulsory viewing during the festive season. 

Director Steve Beck follows up his good-looking fiasco Thir13en Ghosts with another horror that favours style over substance. A hackneyed and unsophisticated morality tale — where greed is inevitably rewarded with tragedy — it revolves around skipper Gabriel Byrne and his salvage team who think they’ve struck gold when they discover a mysterious, loot-filled cruise liner that’s been lost at sea since the 1960s. In fairness, this grisly take on the Marie Celeste legend opens promisingly with an outrageously bloody effects-explosion that defines the mood with a jugular-grabbing jolt. Unfortunately, the ineffectual performances (particularly from an unconvincing Julianna Margulies) and threadbare plot effectively eliminate further tension. Beck desperately replays his key gory moment in an attempt to keep the action afloat, but, instead of providing a lifeline, this simply emphasises what turgid nonsense the rest of the movie really is. 

The raw terror of the 1974 original isn’t replicated here, but director Marcus Nispel provides some great shocks in his gorgeous-looking update of Tobe Hooper’s horror classic. Here, once again, five young people fight for their lives against the deranged Hewitts and their disfigured son, Leatherface. With just a hint of cannibalism, a leering upgrade in sexual content and more gore than the relatively bloodless original, this refit still manages to retain a grungy, unsavoury atmosphere as Scott Kosar’s effective screenplay filters the now déjà-vu plot through seen-it-all slasher imagery and Blair Witch docu-realism. Nispel’s bigger-canvas bloodbath is most successful when veering from the Tobe Hooper blueprint, neatly playing with the gender of the victims in some of the key suspense scenes. Jessica Biel’s final panic-stricken stalking through a meat freezer might be formulaic, but suspense and clammy chills are still created by some dizzying slice-and-dice editing coupled with heaps of hardcore horror.