Night of the Tommyknockers (2022) - Horror Film Review

It was only last month that I reviewed Michael Su's Bridge of the Doomed and now I find myself watching another of his new horrors. Before it was zombies, this time it is a creature feature, one which has been combined with a western. For whatever reason people seem to struggle to mix horrors and westerns together, at the very least I hadn't seen a decent one, everything from the Kurt Russell led Bone Tomahawk to indie films like The Legend of Hawes failed to leave much of an impression. Night of the Tommyknockers may be full of cliches, but that is what works in its favour, as it ticks all the right boxes to feel suitably western, while has some great creature design.

In the 1870's, some miners digging for gold accidentally release some lethal creatures which had existed living beneath the ground for countless years. Meanwhile, Dirk (Richard Grieco - Attack of the Unknown) and his gang of bandits are looking for a new town to rob, having just pulled off a successful bank robbery. Dirk's girlfriend, and fellow gang member, Betsy (Angela Cole) suggests a particular town to head to where she believes the bank is storing gold. They arrive to find the place seemingly deserted, and they soon find out the reason for this, the place had been under constant attack from creatures freed from the nearby mine. With no other choice but to team up with the survivors hiding out in the saloon, they must all work together to try and fend off the creatures until dawn comes.

Night of the Tommyknockers was shot two years after Bridge of the Doomed and used much of the same team who made that one. With that film it sometimes felt like it wasn't able to make the idea of it's main plot, that of  protecting an essential bridge, seem that believable, due to the bridge not seeming that essential. With this film, from the very start it felt like a western. The music was spot on, the locations were perfect, and the huge cast of characters felt like they fitted in to the time period. By the time the intro credits rolled, with lovely sepia tinged images I was fully into the time period, and there was never a moment where it felt like this was a film attempting to create the feel. As stereotypical as some characters and moments were, this felt like a western through and through, with the horror a nicely blended element.

The Legend of Hawes (2022) - Horror Film Review

I have a friend whose surname is 'Hawes' and so I hoped that the Rene Perez (The Dead and the Damned 3: Ravaged) directed Western horror The Legend of Hawes would be decent. Right from the start however it was clear that the budget for this indie film was really quite low. Add in pacing issues, and a general layer of non-excitement all combined to make this into something of a snooze-fest.

Taking place at some point in the 1800s, the film begins with Harriet (Emily Whitcomb - They Watch) desperately fighting off a band of mutant cannibals who had attacked her family. She is successful, though the only survivors on her side are herself and her German cousin, Inger (Karin Brauns - Playing With Dolls: Bloodlust). Despite her religious upbringing, Harriet swears bloody revenge on those who murdered her family, so she hires the first man she meets, as well as seeks the help of a legendary gunslinger, the titular Hawes (Mike Markoff - Escape to the Cove). Hawes however has become a shadow of his former self after his family were murdered by the same band of cannibals. With or without his help, Harriet sets out to go hunt down the murderers.

There is a layer of low budget to this movie that keeps on being a problem from start to finish. The film frequently looks cheap, nowhere more than the very artificial effects the film keeps having, film grain and sudden sped-up moments don't make this look like a classic Western it hopes to ape, but does make the film look cheap. The story was bizarrely baffling, perhaps not helped by me finding it increasingly difficult to focus on what was happening. The story is about Harriet's search to find the killer family, yet she keeps getting assaulted by seemingly infinite members of this same family. To be fair the masks they wear did look good, maybe where a lot of the budget was spent. There are a few prolonged gun fights that were a fun break in the action. Elsewhere there are solitary characters wandering around the wilderness not really doing much of note.

The Twilight Zone: Season 1 (1959) - Horror TV Show Review

The Twilight Zone is a show that almost everyone has heard of, and for good reason, it remains a stone cold classic and one that still holds up today despite first airing over sixty years ago. A year or so back I picked up the complete collection on Blu-ray and after getting my dad the complete box set on DVD for Christmas I have entered into some sort of race with him. This show really is the Black Mirror of its time, while it could be accused of being quantity over quality, the good to great episodes, at least in season 1 far outweigh the bad ones (of which there are a fair few).

Season 1 is made up of a beefy 36 episodes, each one features an intro and an outro voiced by series creator Rod Serling, who also wrote a bunch of the episodes. The show is in an anthology format, each episode self contained featuring unique characters and settings. The thread holding them all together is that the protagonist of each episode has unknowingly strayed into the 'twilight zone', a place where the normal rules of the world no longer apply. Usually this is used to nightmarish effect but not always. There are a bunch of episodes that are sweet and feel good, and a less successful bunch of episodes that are played for comedic effect. The settings vary and are not always restricted to the (at the time) modern day of the 1950's, quite a few are sci-fi in nature, some are Westerns (Mr. Denton on Doomsday and Execution) while others take place during wartime (Judgement Night, The Last Flight and The Purple Testament). Nearly all of the episodes have some type of morality tale they are imparting, and most end with a usually cruel final twist that often manages to elicit a chill.

Similar to Black Mirror fears of the time are used in some of the stories, most notably fear of atomic war which pops up in a bunch of the episodes, such as Time Enough at Last (a man finds he has all the time in the world to do his favourite pastime of reading when he becomes the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust) and Third from the Sun (a group of people plan to pilot a spaceship off their planet due to an impending nuclear war).
There are also the more common worries that people exhibit that resonate today, such as people who yearn for the simpler times of the past (The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine, Walking Distance, A Stop at Willoughby).

Bone Tomahawk (2015) - Horror Film Review

After a year illness free I've been struck down with the flu and so not in the best shape to be doing much. Still it had been too long since my last blog post and so I decided to watch the Western horror Bone Tomahawk. This shall be the first review I have written from bed, and one in which I sneezed all over the laptop screen at one point!

Set in the late 1800's a small American frontier town is attacked and several people taken captive by a tribe of cannibalistic feral humans referred to as troglodytes by the local Native Americans. Among the three captured is the wife of Arthur; (Patrick Wilson of Insidious and The Conjuring) who is currently bed ridden with a broken ankle, and the Deputy Sheriff. After discovering this Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) sets out with his assistant; Chicory (Richard Jenkins), a local gunsmith named Brooder (Matthew Fox), and the injured Arthur in order to stage a rescue...