Our synopsis for it goes like this: “Adjie (Ario Bayu) and Astrid (Sigi Wimala) will leave for Australia the very next day but before that Adjie wants to meet with his rebel sister, Ladya (Julie Estelle). Their meeting does not run smoothly in the beginning as Ladya keeps blaming Adjie for his past mistakes. After persuasion from Astrid, Ladya agrees to send Adjie off in the airport.

The next day on the way to the airport their journey are interrupted when a beautiful woman called Maya (Imelda Therinne) approached them for help as she has just been robbed and she needed their help to bring her home.

After reaching at her home they are introduced by an elegant and mysterious woman called Dara (Shareefa Daanish). And the sincere and good intentions of Dara is only the beginning of a disastrous outcome. Who is Dara actually? And…. will they be able to escape from this “House of Blood” alive?”

This one promised to be a bit more extreme than the usual Indonesian horror effort, and given that I was a little hesitant at first….. You all know what a timid and tender heart lurks inside this lil’ horror movie lovin’ Catgirl, but I told myself: “Awww…  C’mon…..It’s Indonesian for goodness sake…. How truly nasty could it really be?”

Ummmm… errrr…. well… pretty darn bloody, nasty and downright mean in a true “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” meets “The Hills Have Eyes” sorta way as it turns out….. So, do ya wanna know if it’s your cup of tea as well? Then all you gotta do is “Read On!!” and find out…..

I must say…. this one most certainly redefines my understanding of the latest Indonesian Horror films being made these days. Gone are my naive assumptions that the Indonesians are just too darn squeamish overall to break out the big industrial sized drum of blood and gore for their movies and go all “Psycho” with it. Directors Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto wanted to do a shocking film to expand the ideas of their 2007 original 22 min Super 16mm short film “Dara”, and by all appearances they’ve succeed here. They’ve created a nasty violent lil’ film that is, by all standards, the equal of any made anywhere in the genre today. With a bigger budget and a longer run time it’s a weird little gore-fest that plays as very modern and yet also very Indonesian all at the same time.

An old favorite of mine, Julie Estelle of “Kuntilanak”, is back as our heroine Ladya and our story involves an ill fated trip Adjie, her brother and Astrid his expectant wife convince her to take with them on a long drive from Bandung to Jakarta where they plan to fly to Australia and start their new life. There’s some tension here… seems Ladya still blames her brother for the recent death of their parents in a tragic accident. This decision on his part to move to Australia seems like just another of his perceived “betrayals” and it takes some convincing from Astrid to get her to go along with them and their friends, Alam, Eko, and Jimmy.
This was a somewhat hasty set up, story wise…. and it doesn’t give us any insight to the personal dynamics of Ladya and Adjie’s relationship beyond that feeling of distance between them… a bit more back story would have been nice here, especially given the terrible things these two are going to experience later in the film. But hey… you can’t always have everything.

As might be expected… “It’s a dark and stormy night…” and before our lil’ group can get going, they nearly run down a wet, seemingly confused young woman named Maya. Apparently in shock, she tells them she’s been robbed and asks if they’ll give her a lift home. Naturally it’s waaaay out in the woods, but Eko, the driver wants soooo badly to score points with the beautiful and mysterious Maya that he volunteers them all for the trip. Sigh…. Guys, guys, guys…. Must Neko remind you of that old rule that in any horror movie worth it’s name…. it’s never a particularly good idea to do your thinking with your penis…. Yep.This isn’t going to end well for our lil’ group…. not at all.

Maya’s house is home to her eerily strange and absolutely creepy mom, Dara, and two sociopath brothers handsome but coldly odd Adam and quiet, overweight Arman. Just one look at these guys, and your Favorite Catgirl would have been making a beeline for the door, but not these guys. Nope. They agree to stay for dinner….. not knowing our freaky family are all immortal cannibal cultists. D’oh!! You can just sense where this is heading, right?

Thanks to the old plot idea of “drugging the dinner guests”, our little group soon finds themselves all trussed up and helpless…. except for Adjie and Astrid…. seems Dara has other plans for them and their soon-to-be-born child. As if we don’t have enough plot elements already. Unfortunately… we never get any clue as to whether the child will get raised as one of Dara’s “children” or if he’ll merely become some sacrifice to the “Powers of Evil”, or just a tasty nutritional treat for the Cult…. a real pity, as this could have made for a better ending for the film had they been a tad less coy with this promising plot thread.

Instead, our story plays out with our little group getting tied up… till they escape…. frequently split up as they run around in crazed panic…. and, naturally, killed brutally one by one by Dara and her children. It’s not at all original, but it is very well done, suiting the genre conventions we all expect in a film like this. Given that this is an Indonesian film, it’s surprisingly chilling and vicious… with as much bloody mayhem as you would think necessary. Even watching the Singapore edited DVD, I couldn’t help but be struck by the level of violence “Rumah Dara” packs into it’s 94 minute run time.

Overall the acting is good, but I’m sorry to say Julie Estelle wasn’t given much to do as our heroine this time out, being less an empowered woman forced to become a fighter, instead being reduced to more of just an ordinary lucky “survivor”. While I could root for Ladya, I can’t say she felt like a “real” person to me, being much more a stock stereotype character. Instead, our standout performance has to be by Shareefa Daanish as the super creepy Dara….. she’s got an exotic, oddly disturbing edge to her performance that easily let her steal the show in every scene she’s in. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for….. Hopefully when time comes for a sequel, (and you just know there will be…) she’ll be on hand to reprise her role…..

My goodness!! This one really delivers on the promise it made to be one nasty lil’ slice of horror movie goodness. Brutal, yes…. but also campy, bloody, and fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed it…. (Yes, yes…. Even if I did have bad dreams all that night….) Your Favorite Catgirl gives it a well deserved 4 “Meows” out of 5 and my definite recommendation that if slashers and cannibals are your thing too, and subtitles don’t worry you, then “Rumah Dara” is certainly worth your time to track down. The Singapore DVD release is edited for content…. but in this case much less so than the official Indonesian DVD release which has all the decapitation and falling head scenes deleted due to their rather graphic nature. The Singapore Theatrical Version and DVD, does contain those scenes that were edited out of the Indonesian version, although any scenes actually showing blades making contact with flesh have been removed, replaced by reaction shots for the second or so of footage that was to be lost to the censor’s knife. Such cuts are minor and trust me… you won’t even notice the difference. The Singapore DVD release is sparse… with only a Trailer and the film itself, but it is done in 16×9 wide screen with excellent separate English subtitles and is readily available for a decent price of about 20$US or so. (Now…. all I have to do is track down the original 2007 short film….. Hehehehe!!)

Trailer? Of course there’s a Trailer…. and naturally, by now, you’re all chomping at the bit for a chance to take a peek…. so here it is!

Our synopsis goes like this here: “Tiara (Tamara Bleszynski) wants to get over with her traumatic past and is planning to visit Bride’s Waterfall to release her tension. She invites few of her cousins to join her in this trip. Her boyfriend, Lilo (Kieran Sidhu) and the rest seven people are joining this trip.

Upon arrival the group falls in love with its pristine beach and Tiara is delighted and looking forward to have a good time there. However, their joy does not last very long as few strange incidents occurred in the island. Finally, Lilo reveals that the inhabitants of the island have been massacred by a mysterious person.

Then a mysterious masked man starts to terrorize the island. One by one the trip members are killed with their blood being consumed. What is the motive of the murder? Will Tiara escape for safety from the masked man?”

Oh yeah…. sounds like a slasher film alright… but Neko’s hoping that they went a new direction here and at least tried to put their own mark on the genre…. It’s certainly been a good long time since I saw an original take on that old “teens gone wild, teens get dead” story idea. Will they succeed? Or will this one just remind me of the smell of over-ripe bananas gone waaaay bad?

Let’s all find out! Yep… It’s time to “Read On!!”

Our story gets going as Tiara (played by Tamara Blezynski) and her boyfriend, along with her niece Mandy and some of their friends go off for vacation to Pulau Pengantin, the “Bride Island” to see a famous landmark there, the Bridal Falls, where young lovers often pledge their eternal love before marriage as an old tradition. Unfortunately for them, the island isn’t quite as deserted as it’s supposed to be…. The guidebooks apparently forgot to include the little historical bit about a young man who wanted to marry a pretty village woman, but was denied this when the villagers found out that he was a secretly a shaman. They blocked his marriage and a mob of angry villagers burned his face, killed his bride-to-be and drove him away. In terrible revenge, he systematically hunted down and murdered the entire population of the village with his favorite pointy weapon of choice, a cruel boarding pike-like spear thingee. From that time forward, the now insane shaman has haunted the island killing all foolish enough to come there and plotting to use magic to restore his bride to life. Wow…. you’d think for certain that would be easy enough info for our little group to find before they planned their trip…. but nooooo!!! Wouldn’t have much of a movie then, would we? Hehehehe!!

Anyway…. all that implausible plot goofiness aside… it doesn’t take long for our little group to pack up their stuff and charter a couple of boats to head out to the “Deserted Island of Death”. There’s a little bit of character development…. but not much… as we find out about Tiara’s morbid phobia of being in dark places, the legacy of a car accident that nearly killed her prior to the movie, and the somewhat rocky relationship she has with her boyfriend who seems to be constantly avoiding the subject of marriage. None of this really helps us to get much of a feeling for our characters who all fit the generic cardboard stereotypes you’d expect in your standard Slasher film and that’s a pity…..

I’d sooooo hoped for something a bit more compelling and different from Rizal Mantovani, the director of  “Kuntilanak”, my all time favorite Indonesian horror film as well as the also excellent “Mati Suri”, both of which I’ve reviewed here at the Litterbox and enjoyed immensely. He did an excellent job of making both those films scary and suspenseful while keeping a very “Indonesian” feel to them at the same time. Here, he does only a simple workmanlike job at creating a pale imitation of other genre films that, thanks to Indonesian film censorship ideas, lacks most of the elements necessary to make such an effort work effectively.

He’s assembled a young, attractive cast…. and filled his film with plenty of excuses for pretty Indonesian women to act sexy and show some skin, (Knew you guys would like hearing that…. Remember though, in Indonesia, gratuitous nudity is such a no-no….) but…. there’s no real suspense to the killings that occur and very little real gore on hand here. Not exactly what one expects to find in a “Slasher” film.

Hmmmm? Well… at least Tiara and her boyfriend will finally admit their feelings for each other and be forever bonded by this terrible experience… right? Ummmm? Nope. Don’t want to spoil things for you… but the boyfriend dies pretty quickly here, and without much of a dramatic fight or struggle either. Say what? Yep…. this lil’ Catgirl couldn’t believe that story element either, but there you have it. So…. ah…. this means Tiara gets the chance to go all “Rambo” on our crazy Shaman and take revenge for the death of her friends…. right? Ahhh….. sorry…. the film’s just too short for that… But, she does manage to overcome here fear of the dark…. and that’s something, right?

I wish I could say I truly enjoyed this one, but it barely manages a 3 “Meows” out of 5 as a rating from your Favorite Catgirl. So…. I guess I’m just disappointed overall with “Air Terjun Pengantin” as a “Slasher” film…. it just finds itself too unwilling to go the extra mile to put the “exploit” in “exploitation”. A lack of “blood & boobs” can be forgiven, but one has to be extra creative with the story and cinematography to do it in this genre. Unless Indonesian films are your thing, most people who are true fans of this genre would be advised to pass on this one. However… the DVD itself is excellent, as are most recent Indonesian discs, with almost perfect separate English subtitles on board and at a price that can’t be beat here in the US. That alone gave it the push needed to get that extra crucial “Meow” outta this lil’ girl. (Pssssttt!!! Thailand…. pay attention here!! Hehehehe!!)

Ah well…. I’ve got a ton of new Indonesian horror still to watch, so who knows? Maybe one of them will restore my faith in all things scary and Indonesian… Till then, it’s “Meow, meow for now!!”

The Trailer? Yep… as always, Neko’s got ya covered!! Here we go!

The synopsis for it reads: “At an exclusive university dead bodies are turning up with alarming frequency, all believed to be victims of the notorious Campus Killer. The police are stumped as to who the killer might be and, of course, nobody suspects innocent looking med student Barbara. A superficial fashion queen whose childhood dream was to grow up to become the living embodiment of her favorite doll, Cindy Superstar, all Barbara needs now is to find herself a real-life equivalent of Cindy’s plastic partner, Glenn. But behind the mask of her perfectly applied make-up is a deadly cross between Paris Hilton and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, a female serial killer for whom ruthlessly slaughtering people isn’t so much a question of why as one of why not?

Barbara’s grisly trail of murder fortuitously leads her into the arms of Tomas, a fellow student assigned to the campus morgue who is experimenting with a machine designed to translate thoughts and brainwaves into images. What he later discovers, though, is that with a little tinkering (and the addition of a healthy dose of Ecstasy to his subjects) the machine is able to reanimate the dead. Not surprisingly, this proves to be bad news for Barbara as Tomas begins reviving the Campus Killer’s victims in the hope that at least one of them will be able to identify their murderer. Of course, what he hadn’t bargained for was their insatiable hunger for both revenge and for human flesh. Soon, Tomas finds himself the innocent bystander in a bloody and explosive serial killer versus zombies showdown.”

Hmmm… now this one certainly sounds downright goofy. (And you know how Neko sooo likes goofy!!) So forgoing my usual popcorn and wine coolers, we opt for a movie night of spicy nachos and sangria, hoping the movie fairies will bless Carolyn and I with a delightfully grisly laugh fest to remember!! Think you might just like it too? Then you better “Read On” and find out more!

This one starts out with a scene right out of “Scream”… a girl’s locker room, plenty of sexy young co-eds with all the gratuitous nudity one needs in an exploitation film to set just the right ambiance. Oh, yes…. and a creepy masked killer with a big ol’ machete who stalks poor lone Barbara after all the other girls are off to class… but just who here is the predator and who is the prey? We find out pretty quickly who is who… as does the poor doofus who thought dressing up as a masked killer was a good way to peep on naked girls.

Barbara (played to psycho perfection by Macarena Gómez) is the sexy psychotic anti-heroine of director Miguel Martí’s black comedy and quite effortlessly steals every scene in “Sexy Killer” with her perky Barbie doll approach to sociopathy. She’s equal parts sexy co-ed and serial killer with the arsenal of “Kill Bill” , and  the violent combat skills of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”… minus, of course, any annoying moral conscience and regard for the sanctity of human life. More fun… the film allows Barbara to be an amoral “Ferris Bueller” constantly chatting with the audience about the things in her life that make her tick. Mind you… those are some pretty sick things… but hey… sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to make all her dreams come true. So… so wrong…. but you end up actually liking this character and it isn’t long before you start hoping she’ll find true love and happiness…. even if it ends up killing everybody else in the film.

And really…. Barbara’s goals are quite simple…. she just wants the life of Barbie doll clone Cindy Superstar. (I guess Mattel wasn’t really keen on associating with this particular young woman’s world view… go figure.. Hehehehe!!) She wants the colorful dream house, the 2.5 kids, the dog and a wonderful, successful, plastic surgeon husband like Glenn who’ll treat her like the Princess she knows herself to be. So what’s so wrong with that? If only everybody would just stop getting in her way…..

It’s just that our perky lil’ killer can’t seem to resist killing all those people that make her life difficult. It doesn’t help that she also finds the bloody slaughter immensely fun and just soooo, soooo sexy and arousing. She just needs to find the right guy who understands all that… a “kindred spirit” to make all her dreams come true. Barbara’s grisly trail of bloody mayhem fortuitously ends up bringing her and Tomas, a fellow student assigned to the campus morgue to help in the investigation of the “Campus Killer”, together and for each of them it’s both love (and lust…) at first sight.

Tomas and his best bud Alex are working with the police to help track down the killer, thanks to the official coroner having been killed accidentally by Barbara during one of her earlier murders. They’re both smart and have also been experimenting with a machine designed to translate thoughts and brainwaves into images. Just the sort of thing to help therapists see and understand the thoughts of the mentally ill…. Not only that… but it can also be used to see the thoughts of the recently dead, reading the fading electrical activity of their brains. It doesn’t take long before they figure out it could be used to give them a view of the mysterious killer… if only they could get a fresh enough body. And even though this invention could possibly end the Campus Killer’s murderous spree, it might just put an end to Tomas’ chances with Barbara. If only he knew…..

But… despite the fact that Barbara freely admits to being the killer numerous times… and despite a very funny dinner sequence in which she murders a woman for a sexy red dress she wants while on a date with him, poor Tomas never figures it out. Worse, Barbara mistakenly believes he’s a soulless killer too… responsible for the death of the coroner he replaced to move up the ranks and steal his job as well as the guy who lends him his tuxedo to help him score with her. Eventually…. Tomas’ friend Alex gets in her way… and so it’s “Bye-Bye Alex”, gutted and hung up to bleed out in the morgue like a side of beef. Then the film hangs a left…..

What’s more fun that a movie about a cute, sexy serial killer? How about a movie where that serial killer’s victims return from the dead as flesh eating zombies to seek vengeance against her for their murders? Oh yeah…. seems that Alex and Tomas’ brain machine has a side effect you see… it doesn’t just let you see the thoughts of the recently deceased, it also reanimates them…. Yep. They start out being pretty normal… if a wee bit grisly looking… but soon decay sets in and they quickly degenerate into the fun loving, instinct driven, flesh-eaters we all know and love. Unfortunately… by the time Tomas figures this out he’s already reanimated the 30 odd victims Barbara has already put in the morgue… whoops!!

Now the film turns into a kinetic zombie fest… Tomas rushes to the campus memorial party to save Barbara and the others from the vengeance of the living dead, only to finally figure out it’s Barbara they are after… that she really is the killer after all… She figures out that Tomas isn’t the stone cold killer she thought he was… But it’s too late, they can’t deny the love that binds them together and so they go all “Resident Evil” on their opponents zombie butts, blowing up the party and killing all the undead fiends and students alike in an over the top ending.

Does this mean that our Hero and Heroine will live all happily ever after and walk off into the moonlight? Will they get the fantasy Barbara has always wanted for her very own? Well… it’s best to remember the old parable of the Scorpion and the Frog….. (as Barbara reminds us at the end of this one…)… and know that a scorpion will always be a scorpion just because that’s what it truly is.

Neko really… really… liked this one… (and you know “slasher” films really aren’t usually my “thing”…) It’s smart, and funny, yet viciously gruesome all at the same time with great zest and style that gives it a hallucinogenic bliss all it’s own. The director Miguel Martí’ and writer Paco Cabezas obviously love the horror genre and the film is peppered with great moments inspired by all those films we’ve all seen, from Wes Craven’s “Scream”, to George R. Romero’s zombie epics, “Friday the 13th”, and “The Silence of the Lambs”, even managing to throw in lots of neat lil’ references to films from other genres including “Titanic” and “Taxi Driver” sure to give movie buffs years of fun catching them all. The cinematography, effects, and editing are sharp and the acting good… particularly Macarena Gomez, who absolutely nails the crucial role of Barbara, a character that could have come across as far less appealing and fun in the hands of less talented actress.

All in all… I can most definitely recommend this one to people looking for something… well… just a wee bit different… from your average horror move. Your Favorite Catgirl Princess gives it 4 “Meows” out of 5 with more than a few contented purrs for the lil’ touches that make me know I’ll be watching it again and again in the years to come. If you like your scares mixed with more than a few laughs or if you ever wondered what “Legally Blonde” meets “Halloween” just might be like… then you’ll probably want to see it too.

The Region 2 PAL formatted DVD is certainly a spartan one… with only the movie itself and a couple of Trailers…. presented 16:9 widescreen in Spanish with excellent English subtitles. It’s sufficient I suppose, but I would have really liked a “Making of Featurette” to watch as well… The nicest thing is probably the price… only 7$ or so US, so you can’t go wrong if you hunt it down.

As always… there’s a Trailer and here it is to whet your appetites!

Our quick synopsis goes like this: “Ordinary young men and women often dream of the unreachable life of the worlds idle rich. Wade, Richard, Hitomi, Holly and Lin certainly do. They have all received an invitation to an exclusive party held by a group of rich & famous people,obviously addressed to them by mistake.But all the same, they attend. It is the best party ever, a wishing game takes place where their deepest desires materialize. But when they find Richards body brutally killed, the wishing game turns into a killing game in which they are the tortured victims and a rich audience the sadistic spectators. To escape from the party and survive is now their only dream.”

Hmmmm? Sounds grisly…. and you know how that sorta goes down for this lil’ Catgirl…. but it is subtitled, and I can never pass up a chance to snag Asian horror with subtitles. So… hopefully it’ll be more of an over the top spoof than a realistic gore fest…. but somehow I doubt it. I just know I’m gonna have nightmares….

When this one came out of my “to watch”pile the other night, Carolyn took one look at the cover with it’s gruesome image of a woman’s severed hand spilling out of a bloody red leather purse and wrinkled up her face and gave me “the look”….. She’s fully aware of my general distaste of “torture porn” and asked me “Now, Miyuki… dear…. I don’t want to tell you not to watch this one, but….. you know you are going to have nightmares again, right? I’m still sore from the last time you smacked me in your sleep you silly goof. Are you sure this is such a good choice for a movie tonight?”

She’s not exaggerating either. I do have some of the most terrible nightmares after watching these sorts of films. I toss and turn…. sometimes I tremble and cry in my sleep, and, at my absolute worst, I scream and lash out, unfortunate for whomever might be curled up asleep with me at the time. Carolyn found herself on the receiving end of some of that after we watched “Martyrs”….. for which I was truly sorry. I just have that sort of vivid imagination and a certain level of paranoia regarding that sort of thing…. even though I’ve never ever been threatened or hurt like that myself for real. So… why watch this one?

I suppose as an amateur “movie reviewer”, I’ve always felt a bit silly about liking horror movies but not all horror movies. Given that… it’s only fair to give such fare a try now and again…. once in a while I even do find one that entertains me along with scaring the panties off me…. Hehehehe!! Was this such a film? Let’s take a look…..

This one starts out in a loud pulsing dance party…. two lovely Asian girls get all sexy together on the dance floor….. (much to my sweet Carolyn’s delight… Such a naughty, naughty  girl!!) After this prerequisite hot lesbian dance scene, one of them leaves to powder her nose. While in the ladies room, she finds a purse, obviously forgotten by it’s owner on the counter. She hears a noise…. and thinking she’s not alone, calls out to whomever might be in the bathroom with her. No one answers…… Her worst instincts prompt her to try to peek inside looking to steal whatever nice goodies might be there…. but instead she knocks it to the floor spilling out a woman’s severed head. Before she can even scream, a shadowy figure lurking in hiding grabs her from behind and cuts her throat…. cue those opening credits!!

Next we meet our hero, part time delivery boy and chauffeur for giant construction corporation the Weida Group, Wade (played by Bryant Chang) accidentally catches a rich client, Mr. Yang (played by Jerry Huang), having wild sex in the backseat of his limo with supermodel Dana (played by Japanese AV porn star Maria Ozawa). In a lame attempt to buy Wade’s silence about the incident, Yang gives him an invitation to attend a special “Invitation Only” party in his place masquerading as his cousin. Wade figures it’s a good deal….. and is ever so glad Yang is willing to let the whole incident pass that he jumps at the chance to go.

The party has just one odd twist…. on the invitation, Wade is asked to list his one desire in all the world…. with the implicit idea that it’ll somehow come true. Not certain of what it’s all about he writes down his secret want…. a luxury sports car and then let’s Yang fix up his wardrobe so he can fit in with the other wealthy young things sure to be in attendance.

We’re off to the party… held in a creepy deserted factory/ warehouse waaay away from the city…. getting bad vibes yet? Wade finds himself easily accepted as one of five new “members” of this elitist group founded by an eccentric European financier who apparently throws this same “fantasies come true” theme party every year. Also new to the scene are famous pianist Robert, banking executive Hitomi (played by Julianne Chu), politician Lin (played by Ma Kuo-hsien), and investment specialist Holly (played by He Chia-wen). They are all seemingly as thrilled as Wade to be part of the party…. and share a secret with him, although they don’t know it. They are all impostors just like him…. invited to the party for the “special amusement” of the jaded, sadistic members who like to see ordinary people savagely tortured and killed. But first….. it’s just soooo much fun to tease and delight your victims first by seemingly bringing their secret desires to life. Wade gets to gamble with a line of credit set up for him by Yang, winning big and even scoring with his dream girl Dana before being given that sports car he’s always wanted….

Pianist Robert supposedly gets his one true wish… a piano once used by Mozart but is instead the very first of our little group to get killed. From this point forward, the group gets revealed for the fakes they really are… and then subjected to a chase through the warehouse for the fun of Yang and his buddy the European Financier…. When they get caught, they become part of various macabre torture sessions for the amusement of all the other guests. These are some nasty bits too….. Lin, for example, gets to discover just what happens when your testicles get hooked up to a pair of jumper cables… Brrrrr!!

Here’s where I started to squirm…. and I kept squirming uneasily for the entire rest of the film. Luckily… while nasty in it’s implications, most of the torture scenes are relatively tame compared to some of the other films in this genre. That, and you actually do become sympathetic for poor Wade and nice girl Hitomi…. you really do root for them and want them to survive. For me at least, that’s the only saving grace for a film of this type. Well…. that and you really want to see them punish those evil rich snobs…. and this film doesn’t fail us there. We do get to see Wade get even…. and in a most satisfying fashion. But… will he and Hitomi escape this hell and end up together? Ummm? Well….. It’s not really that sort of movie…..

So how do I rate this one? Well…. for Taiwan’s first foray into this area, it’s not bad at all. While not my general cup of tea, it’s well done with a simple plot that will transfer well from country to country as it get sold into distribution. It’s not even particularly gory either…. and given a couple of good characters for the audience to root for, remembers the cardinal rule for slasher films: “Somebody has to survive… and evil must be shown to get serious payback in the end.” Given these reasons, I can give “Invitation Only” a reasonable 3 “Meows” out of 5, but if my loyal Readers want something… well… repulsively nasty and bloody then this one will probably seem a bit tame to those of you who liked “Saw” or “Hostel”….. I didn’t even have really bad dreams that night… although Carolyn did say I was a bit “restless” in bed. I suppose that’s an improvement… Hehehehe!!

Trailer? Yep…. here it is in all it’s repulsive glory…..

Back too for the action is actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal as spunky Norse heroine, Jannicke. With the recent announcement that a 3rd film is in the works, it looks like I’d better get watching this one to catch up.

Our quick synopsis reads as follows: “Jannicke, the lone survivor from the previous film’s slayings is discovered wandering cold and traumatized, covered with blood and carrying a pick axe along a deserted, snow-covered mountain road. Taken to a nearby hospital for observation and treatment, she tells the police of her terrible ordeal. As the authorities head into the mountains to investigate the her story, the hospital staff members and their patients quickly learn the shocking truth for themselves as the institution’s wards and corridors become the new hunting ground for the unstoppable killer.”

Sounds good… but will it sustain the thrills and suspense of the first film? I guess you’ll just need to “Read On” to find out!!

But…. but… didn’t evil creepy Parka Guy die at the end of the first one? Jannicke got all spunky and handed him his ass but good then knocked him down a crevasse, didn’t she? Of course she did… but since when has that ever stopped a crazy psycho on the rampage? It never does…. They ALWAYS come back for more…. (that’s why we have sequels, silly… Hehehehe!!)

This one starts out in a remote Norwegian hospital, which is apparently scheduled to close soon. It’s nestled in a tiny remote mountain village. (Probably the one Eirik thought he’d be able to ski to for help in the last movie….) Only a skeleton staff remain on duty to tend patients still being treated. Camilla (played by Marthe Snorresdotter Rovik) is one of the two doctors still there. Her boyfriend, Ole (played by Kim Wifladt), is a paramedic and some sort of Mountain Rescue guy working with the local police. They have the same problem as Jannicke and Eirik… they are two people, obviously in love, whose lives are going in two different directions. Called out to investigate a snowed-in automobile, he finds Eirik’s car abandoned where they left it. Then, while driving back to the hospital, Ole nearly hits a somebody in the road holding a pick axe. It’s our spunky heroine, Jannicke, the sole survivor from the first film. Suffering from exposure, traumatized by her experiences and exhausted he takes her back to the hospital for treatment. There, she tells the police all about the murders of her friends and Parka Guy. The Sheriff and his men investigate the hotel and crevasse with Ole’s help, confirming the truth of her almost unbelievable story. Recovering the corpses of Jannicke’s friends and Parka Guy, they bring them back to the hospital morgue where it soon goes all terribly, horribly wrong.

This movie moves along much faster than the first one did… much of the suspense is sacrificed along the way, but that’s OK. After all, we already know who the killer is…. the film is more of a survival gore fest that a suspense film. The hospital stands in nicely for the deserted, dark, labyrinthine ski lodge. There is a slightly larger cast on hand to allow for a bigger body count as might be expected…. and Parka Guy moves from the role of deranged territorial loner with revenge in mind to unstoppable, possibly supernatural force of evil that lives only to kill.

This shift in plot gears works… (it always does) and thank goodness the police don’t waste all their efforts thinking it was Jannicke who killed all her friends… that always wastes sooo much time in a film like this. Instead they know that it’s all Parka Guy immediately, and only try to to sedate and restrain Jannicke for her own good…. she’s been through so much you see… With the larger cast and the bigger hospital environment to play with, soon you are trying hard to figure out who is going to make it and who is going to die… horribly. We’ve got quite the choices this time out. Camilla and Ole, I’ve mentioned… but we also have young and pretty nurse Audhild (played by Johanna Morck), our other doctor, Herman (played by Fridtjov Såheim), the local Sherriff Einar and his men, as well as two patients, a little boy, Daniel, and a dotty old lady with a bad case of Alzheimers. Yep… gonna be a big ol’ stack of dead people when this one winds down.

Now…. I’m not going to ruin things for you by telling you how things unwind, but let’s just say Jannicke does her best Jaimie Lee Curtis imitation as you get a very large case of deja vu here. “Halloween 2″ was here first… a long, long time ago, but as with most things old, sometimes they can be new again if you handle them right. The story keeps the momentum fast, and it’s best if you don’t get toooo attached to characters…. they probably aren’t going to end up so well.

So…. how does it end? Nope…. Not gonna tell you!! Trust me you’ll want to watch this one yourself… (but let me say that since they just announced “Fritt Vilt 3″, you can be certain somebody makes it through alive.) If the level of thrills stay constant, this lil’ Catgirl’s gonna want to see that one too.

Neko gives this one a solid 3 “Meows” out of 5 for being a reasonably entertaining effort with a good nod to an old favorite, but again, I wish that the film had taken a few chances with the genre and moved someplace to call it’s own…. The next one is suppossed to be a prequel, so maybe we’ll see that then. If slasher films are your idea of an evenings fun, you can definitely do far worse than this. It does entertain…. and that’s what we want, right?

As for the disc…. now there was a disappointment. I saw this one on the UK Region 2 PAL release…. and was expecting at least as class an act as the Anchor Bay release for the first film. But no…. We get a letterboxed, uncut release…. but strangely enough, with burned in English subtitles…. Who in heck does that anymore? Given the ease with producing a disc with separate ones, it’s a let down for certain and a major annoyance considering those subs are pushed up into the image rather than being positioned down in the black bar of the botten edge. Also… unlike the US realease of the first film, there was no English audio dub either. Not a problem for me, but I had planned an evening with this film as a way of sharing “Movie Time”with Carolyn and she’s not all that comfortable with subtitles…. D’ohhh!!!

Trailer you ask? Hehehehe… there’s always a Trailer… somewhere’s out there and here it is…

Yep…. Neko-chan doesn’t have that many Region 5 goodies, so when I chanced upon this one, it took only a little bit of research to confirm that, yes… it was a horror film, and yes, it actually has English subtitles!! Could I bear to pass it up? Not on your life.

The synopsis reads like this: “They were the students of archaeology who ought to serve their academic internship. Their task was to search. Incidentally the students find the lost entrance to the pit which was a myth among the scientists. Disregarding evil omens they meet, the students decide to descend underground and discover its mystery. But they don’t know there are things one shouldn’t search…”

OK…. Well, I’ve bought movies from far away lands with less information available on them than this… So let’s dig in find out what “Shtolnya” is really all about, shall we?

Well… this one doesn’t waste any time getting right to things. Probably ’cause this one is a fairly short movie at only 80 minutes or so… We start out on a basketball court, and there’s the standard old conflict…. a harmless geek versus the “jocks”. We see just what sort of real jerks Bita and his buddy Den can be… you just know that’s gonna make us sorry for poor Shorty who seems to be the focus of their cruelty. Yep… you already know who this lil’ Catgirl is voting for the top of the body count list.

Right after the coach reprimands the boys we switch to the hallway at the college?… errrr… ummm.. high school?… ummm? Neko isn’t really sure, and neither will you be, as the movie sort of captures that limbo of existence with a bunch of characters that could be straight out of any 80′s horror film made right here in the West…. To say that they are cardboard is perhaps a bit mean, but truly accurate. We have the stereotypical Jock, Bita (played by Sergiy Stasko), his best bud Den, the club savvy guy with the car (played by Pavlo Li). “Shorty”, our geek and all around decent guy (played by Oleksiy Zabegayev). Joining them are prerequisite blonde popular girl Katya (played to perky perfection by Olga Storozhuk) along with her tag-along BFF, Viki (played by Svitlana Artamonova). Add a bearded old professor (played by Mykola Kartzev) and a trip to a dig site near the old area once the stomping ground of an ancient cult of devil worshiping pagans, and we got the basic formula for any number of films.

This, I think is both the strength and the weakness of the film….. Seriously. If it weren’t for the cast all speaking Ukrainian, these guys would all be easily mistaken for the kids in any Slasher film made 20 years ago. Almost nothing about it gives you a feeling for the Ukrainian setting at all. On the other hand, this also makes the film readily accessible to those who might otherwise be intimidated by having to read subtitles as well as figure out the unfamiliar customs of the locals. I watched this one with Carolyn, and she felt immediately comfortable with it, not needing any of my usual explanations as to what the heck might be going on.

Anyway…. the kids all pile into Den’s car for the long drive out to the dig site after Katya sticks up for Shorty and tells the two neanderthals to cut out their crap and get with the program. We have a few moments of character development on the drive…. long enough to see how badly Shorty pines for Katya… and long enough to heave a brief minute of fear as a bird does the whole kamikaze thing right into the windshield of the car. It’s the bloodiest moment of the film, and probably the one real scare to happen.

At the site, they meet up with the professor who tells them about the evil cult. How they got suppressed by the church, their members scattered and their idol taken for the museum of Kiev. But wait!! It seems the Nazi’s manage to find their way into this story….. during the war they overran this part of the old Soviet Union and so the idol and all the treasures from the museum were secretly hidden away in a maze of tunnels that honeycomb the entire region. Unfortunately, nobody knows just where they ended up, and it’s the professors dream to find the idol and return it to the museum. The kids find the entrance to the old tunnels… but they are locked up and Bita and Den are dead set against letting the professor steal all the glory of the find.

That night, something prowls around their campsite and the girls and Shorty get coerced into not telling the professor about the tunnels…. you know where this is going. Next day…. the professor is nowhere to be found, but strangely enough the lock to the gate on the tunnels is broken, and Bita convinces them the professor has abandoned them to grab the treasures for himself!! With that, it’s into the tunnels to search for him, doing the whole “breadcrumbs and mapping” thing to keep from getting lost. But you know it’s doomed to failure… because they aren’t alone at all.

From this point forward it’s the standard plot…. lots of bumbling through dark tunnels after they get lost (of course..), as one by one our kids are knocked off. One by booby trap…. one by killer rats…. and so forth. Neko isn’t gonna tell you who dies and how, but you can pretty much figure out, it’s gonna be a much smaller group that crawls outta here. The best part had to be when our heroes try to yell for help through an old ventilation pipe to the surface and manage to have a guy less than 5 feet from the pipe…. but wearing ear protectors and running a generator and chainsaw…. boy, does that suck.

Eventually… the survivors all get to find that the ancient cult still exists… even though it’s just one guy… and he’s got the idol in some creepy underground temple, and he needs a perky cute human sacrifice for his god. Naturally perky Katya fits the bill just fine. Will she get saved from this terrible fate? Will she and Shorty hook up and make it out alive? Remember… this one uses an old, old plot. so there really isn’t any other way to go.

So… how do I rate this one? Well… it’s got a trusty plot that has been around the block more than a time or two, but it didn’t get that way because it doesn’t work. The acting is nothing special… but then, it’s not terrible either. Carolyn herself asked me why this one hadn’t shown up over in the US on DVD… it seems like a natural, requiring no editing or translation at all to make it work… just a good english audio dub. She liked it well enough… and I found it a nice lil’ popcorn cruncher worth an evenings watch. I give it a middle of the road 3 “Meows” out of 5 for doing it’s job, if nothing else extra.

The Ukrainian DVD is Region 5, PAL formatted, with letterboxed image and decent subtitles in both English and Russian. There’s a “Making of” feature, a ridiculous number of Trailers on board for other films…(one of which is some nifty Russian Submarine war movie I just gotta find…) and a small stills gallery and character bios.

Trailer? Yep… there’s a Trailer available, but it took some looking to find it. (It didn’t help that while researching this one I kept bumping into a Ukrainian Urban music group with the same name as this film…. D’ohhh!!) Still…. Neko is anything if not persistent, so here it is…. enjoy!!

Our quick synopsis reads: “Cheol-min makes a living by working in the shipping business. He has a daughter suffering from a heart condition, and in need of surgery. To save his daughter, he urgently needs the tremendous amount of 60,000,000 won. To make this money, he gets involved in dangerous illegal gambling and barely saves his life by promising he will take care of body disposal for the gang. On his way to Gangwon-do where he intends to dump the bodies, he encounters a police van that had been in an accident, and ends up giving the police officer a ride. Although this situation is tense, events take a turn for the worse.”

Soooo, interesting enough for you you want to “Read On”? I thought so….. Hehehehe!!

This one starts out by introducing us to hard working independent truck driver Jeong Cheol-min (played by Yoo Hae-jin) and shows us how he makes a slim living hauling freight for small businesses that can’t afford to deal with the big transport companies. You know how nearly broke he is by the way he has to con himself little extras like sharing a meal with his customers…. even helping to slaughter a pig for his supper. He’s squeamish about that, and it helps to set the tone for this poor guy later on when things get really bad. He’s got a cute little daughter… Da-yeong (played adorably by little Lee Joon-ha) that he treasures more than anything alse in his life. He can’t see her as much as he’d like… his job keeps him sooo, sooo busy, and he constantly worries about her. Seems she has the same heart defect that killed her mother…. and it’s his worst fear that she’ll suffer the same fate.

Of course that’s exactly what happens…. shy, lonely little Da-yeong ends up having a heart attack while trying to play with some other little girls who tease and trick her into exerting herself too much at the playground. The doctor tells Cheol-min that only a heart transplant will save her… that luckily there is a compatible donor available… but that he’ll need to come up with 60,000 won to “outbid” a rich man who wants that heart for his son. What’s a poor but honest trucker to do?

Well… he sells what little he has… borrows all the money he can get, even from crooked loan sharks, tries even to sell his truck, except that nobody will give him anywhere near what it’s worth. Stupidly he even gets tricked into risking it all playing poker with some gangsters….. and naturally loses everything. He goes crazy when he finds out the “helpful” guy who got him involved was nothing more than a payed shill for the gang…. while chasing him down for revenge, he makes the even bigger mistake of discovering the Mob boss himself surrounded by a pile of bodies….. Oooops!!

That’s almost the end of him right there and then… luckily the cops show up and a quick deal gets struck…. if he takes the bodies away… sees that they disappear and keeps his mouth shut, he can keep his truck, his life, and even the money he’ll need for Da-yeong’s operation. It’s a deal with the devil… but it’s the only shot he’s got…. and hey, things couldn’t get any worse, could they? Ummmm.. never ask that question…. things can always get worse…

Seems everywhere he goes, there are police roadblocks…. not exactly what you want to run into with a pile of corpses under a tarp….. and worse, his truck is bleeding. Oozing, really…. but hey, Cheol-min just knows somebody’s gonna notice. Thank goodness it starts to rain, washing all that incriminating gore away… now if he can just make it to the lonely reservoir to dump the bodies, he’s home free. Until he happens upon the accident. A police van run off the road… full of even more corpses, and a badly injured cop too, but he can’t call for help…. he’s got that little problem in the truck, see. He hates to do it, but he drives away… promptly hitting an injured policeman who lurches out of the high grass looking for help. Just what he needs. He doesn’t kill him…. but the policeman tells him that serial murder Kim Yeong-ho caused the crash while being taken for execution….. he’s now on the loose and only the cop knows exactly where he’ll strike next. He promptly commandeers Cheol-min to drive him in pursuit of this dangerous killer… much to Cheol-min’s dismay. Yep…. it can get worse than even this….. You like Neko will figure out immediately that the “policeman” is none other than the serial killer himself, but the film does try to hide it…. just not well enough…. You won’t be surprised when Cheol-min finds the wanted poster with his picture on it at a convenience store bathroom… Meanwhile…. the real police figure out that Kim Yeong-ho is in a truck…. they begin a dogged pursuit, always one step behind… or is that one death behind?

Pretty soon the cat is out of the bag… and to save his life Cheol-min tells Kim about the bodies…. tells him he’s a far more dangerous murderer than Kim…. and that there’s no need to kill him, he’s certainly not going to report anything to the police with his own guilt to hide. It almost works…. but then fate, in the shape of a poor traffic cop, intervenes to mess things up but good. Kim ends up killing him… and making Cheol-min take part to ensure he been telling Kim the truth…. While they load the body, three poor guys drive by in a car…. and Kim forces Cheol-min to chase them down…. there can be no witnesses you see…. Here the film is at it’s best… you’ll squirm uncomfortably as Cheol-min kills one of those guys accidentally trying to brain Kim with a rock. Circumstance after terrible circumstance just keeps digging a deeper hole for our poor trucker. You just know this can’t end well…. but at least it can’t get any worse, right?…… Wrong.

Driving along…. Kim tells Cheol-min that if he takes him to his home, he’ll part ways with him…. but a rough road causes the tailgate to pop open and drops a body out on the road…. Luckily Cheol-min spots it and gets out into the rain to reload the corpse so they can get moving. While this happens, one of the bodies turns out not to be so dead after all. Bloody… confused and scared, a bar girl named Han Saet-byeol has somehow survived the beating she took from the gangster boss, awoken beneath the tarp, and now she wants help from Cheol-min. He knows that if Kim finds her, she will end up dead… and probably him as well. Can life dump any more grief on poor Cheol-min?

Well…. of course it can. By now the police are closing in…. they’ve figured out where Kim is really going. His psychiatrist’s home…. seems he got a bone to pick with her about the decision she made to report him as sane…. especially given that it was leading him towards execution. He wants a second opinion… and this time he’s pretty certain he can convince her just how homicidal and psychotic he really is. Even if it kills her.

Here we reach the climax of “Truck”…. Yes… Yes… Kim knows that the girl in the back is alive, he’s got those creepy serial killer senses that just tell him that stuff…. he also knows Cheol-min’s been lying all this time and he’s already primed himself to kill his psychiatrist…. her husband…. the girl… and our hero too. He’s figured out Cheol-min is by nature too soft hearted to fight like he needs to…. but he hasn’t figured on Cheol-min’s desire to survive for little Da-yeong’s sake. He just has to…. he promised he’d take her to see the ocean, and it’s a promise he’ll kill to keep. There’s a fight here…. nasty, rolling in the mud, using anything and everything to hurt the other guy…. the kind of fight Kim lives for. Somehow though, Cheol-min pulls it together and prevails…. a chunk of glass to the eye sorta helps there, but hey…. Kim deserves it.

You think it’s finally over…. the psychiatrist rushes off to the hospital with her wounded husband… Cheol-min and Saet-byeol drive to the reservoir to dispose of the corpses. End of story, right? Nope….. Kim’s still alive, he kills poor Saet-byeol and we’ve got just enough time for one final fight, before the police arrive.

Here Neko thought she knew what would happen…. that with the police closing in, no possible way Cheol-min can explain all this, and the serial killer who can’t be allowed to escape and go after little Da-yeong in revenge, Cheol-min should have gone down fighting taking the killer with him in true heroic fashion. Afterall… wouldn’t her father’s heart have been a perfect match for his ailing daughter? That would have made for a nice if melodramatic ending. But no…. here the film takes it’s fine atmospheric buildup and squanders it for a lame fade to black after the police shoot down Kim, and arrest Cheol-min. A voiceover news report mentions the Killers apprehension, the arrest of the gangsters, and we end with a sweet beach scene between father and, apparently now healthy, daughter. Sweet…. but soooo totally wrong for the rest of the film. BOOOOO!!!

This is a well made film…. Yoo Hae-jin’s portrayal of Cheol-min is dead on, with that “everyman” quality that makes you want everything to turn out alright in the end, but the filmakers betray the story by giving in to the impulse to paint the rosy ending…. it’s just too improbable…. (Neko assumes he got a deal for his cooperation with the police, but how did he afford Da-yeong’s operation then?) The atmosphere is good too…. with the constant rain becoming almost a character in itself, combining with the darkness of the road to focus the viewer firmly on Cheol-min’s plight. The escalating series of complications works too…. I found myself constantly asking what could possibly happen to make things worse at every turn. But it isn’t enough to outweigh that terrible ending.

So… in conclusion, Neko has to give “Truck” only 3 “Meows” out of her possible 5. A less happy ending would have gotten a higher number of “Meows” but still would have fallen short of my top rating. Oh, well…. The discs are well produced as all Korean discs are, with those perfect English subtitles that make them the best produced discs in Asia these days for the discerning english speaking viewer like myself. Unfortunately, they are also pretty pricey at 29-32$ US… my advice is to wait for the inevitable HK disc to come out if you decide you want to see this one for yourself. Don’t get me wrong, it is worth seeing…. how much is up to you.

As always… your Favorite Catgirl leaves you with the Trailer, enjoy!!

The synopsis for it reads: “Jannicke, Morten Tobias, Eirik, Mikael and Ingunn are on a snowboarding vacation in Jotunheimen. They are forced to take shelter in an abandoned ski hotel when Morten Tobias breaks his leg and their car is too far away for them to reach within nightfall. They quickly discover that the hotel was closed back in the seventies due to the disappearance of the managers’ son. Unknown to them, someone is still living here in the hotel, and getting home, or even surviving the stay, isn’t going to be as easy as they believe.”

This one premiered in Norway back on October 13, 2006 and was instantly hailed as one of the best modern Norwegian horror movies. I haven’t seen too many other Norwegian films, so I’ll have to take their word on that… Hehehehe!!

I had heard only a little about it waaay back then, but missed the chance to pick myself up a copy of the Norwegian DVD release…. luckily Anchor Bay seems to have released it here uncut, so will it turn out to be something special or just another “Teens get slaughtered by a Psycho” version of that old plot line we’ve seen before? Hmmmmm? Lets check it out….

Yep…. basically this one follows that tried and true plot we all seen before. You know the one… take five people, usually young and attractive, and have them do something really, really dumb that ends up stranding them out in the middle of nowhere…. or at least so close to nowhere you can see it from whatever deserted place you find to use as shelter. Old summer camps…. desert ghost towns…. deserted insane asylums…. abandoned military bases…. cursed Private Girl’s Schools….. obscure scientific research outposts… derelict space stations…. or, as in this case, creepy ski resorts isolated waaaay up in the mountains. You know the places… the ones that are always home sweet home to some crazy ass psychotic killer. Yep…. we got all that here. So let the bloodletting begin!

“Fritt Vilt” doesn’t stray too far from this tried and true storyline either, if it hadn’t been in Norwegian, you’d have sworn it was a 90′s slasher flick from right here in the good ol’ US of A. Does that mean Neko thinks this one is doomed right from the start? Not at all….. As I’ve said before… sometimes the enjoyment of a film is in how comfortable a familiar it is, especially if it can add something new to the mix that manages to make it all it’s own.

This one starts with the prerequisite flashback…. in it, a young boy with a large birthmark over one eye is running for his life through a  raging blizzard somewhere in Jotunheimen, being chased by some unknown person. Eventually, he stumbles and falls, allowing his unseen pursuer to catch up to him and despite his plaintive pleas, that person then buries him alive in the snow. This isn’t exactly what it seems though, but we’ll find out about that later…..

Then we jump forward to the present, where we meet our unlucky cast of attractive twenty-something protagonists/victims. All of the standard stereotypes are here: Eirik; the oldest of the group, our mature, sturdy, no nonsense, sensible leader; his buddy Morten Tobias, the prankster and comedian of the group, Jannicke, Eirik’s longtime girlfriend… and our best choice for tough, spunky, but tender heroine; Ingunn, Jannicke’s best friend and hopelessly flirtatious tease (you almost know right from the start she’s gonna be the first to die); and Mikal, Ingunn’s latest “Hunk of the Moment” and the youngest of the group of friends. When first we see them, they are driving down a snowy deserted road on their way to a day of snowboarding off in the mountains of Jotunheimen. It’s a big national park in Norway named after the mythical Norse “Land of the  Giants”…. filled with huge mountains… snow… and little or no people in some of the harsher, more extreme parts. Ahhhh…. perfect. There’s some character development time here… just enough to show Jannicke and Eirik are uneasy about their relationship and where it’s headed… that Morten has a secret crush on Jannicke….. and that Ingunn is a hopeless bimbo with the serious “hots” for Mikal.

When they get there… they immediately climb the first unbelievably tall spiky peak they find and decide to do the whole extreme snowboarding thing down the other side. (Ummmm?… Ahh… Neko-chan… Won’t that leave them with a big honking mountain between themselves and the car? Yep…it certainly will. Not the most fatal of mistakes they’ll make, but certainly a big one.)

During the run, Morten falls and breaks his leg. One of those nasty, bone sticking out, all twisted around sort of breaks that tells our little group they wont be hauling his butt back up over “Mount Crumpit” anytime soon. They figure they are screwed… but then they spot some buildings, a ski resort just close enough to reach before nightfall.

Once they get down to the resort, the group soon discovers that it’s obviously been deserted for a long time. They break in by climbing snowdrifts to let them through a second story window. As soon as they get inside, they put Morten down on a couch in the parlor and try to do the ol’ “First Aid” thing. After wrenching the broken leg back into position and splinting it, Jannicke douses the wound with some vodka and superglues the gaping wound shut. Yipe!! Jannicke certainly shows her spunk here… performing some battlefield medicine that would make Rambo proud.

Eirik, Mikal and Ingunn then go off to explore the abandoned resort, while Jannicke stays behind to keep the injured Morten company. Those three manage to find an old generator in the basement and some fuel so that Eirik can get the power on. With the lights back on… in that flickering creepy way all lights gets turned on in places like this…they settle in for the night.

Naturally, lovebirds Mikal and Ingunn decide to run off all by themselves for some “quality time” while Eirik works on the generator. While exploring the hotel, they find a room once obviously on fire with the window broken, and Ingunn is shocked to find blood and small amounts of hair on a shard of glass. This never really gets explained, but Neko is guessing it’s probably leftover from one of the other unlucky visitors to this creepy place.It should warn them… but naturally it doesn’t.

Eirik, on his way back to the parlor, hears noises from somewhere deeper down in the cellar, but figures it’s just Mikal and Ingunn messing about. It isn’t… but he’ll find that out later. Unfortunately it’ll be too late by then. It always is….

Back upstairs, Jannicke finds the hotel’s registry book and sees that the last guest checked out waaay back in 1975, and under the names of those last registered guests, there’s a cryptic message reading: “We hope you find your son”. With it, there is a picture of a family. Of course, the boy in the photo is the same one who was being chased and buried in the snow during the opening flashback. This makes them uneasy… but not enough to keep Ingunn and Mikal from deciding that the lounge is too public a place for the two of them to spend the night. They head upstairs to find a room for the night. You know what’s gonna happen next.

Mikal and Ingunn get all cosy…. but then just when things are getting hot and sweaty, she puts the brakes on things. Mikal gets upset…. the way Ingunn’s been carrying on he’s confused by the mixed signals she’s sending, and leaves her alone figuring she’s just been teasing him all along. It saves his life… for now. Ingunn pouts and stays in the room, but soon the killer decides she’s just too tempting a victim to pass up. So in good psycho killer fashion, decked out in his scary ol’ parka and glacier goggles he puts an end to poor Ingunn after a short chase with his signature pointy weapon of choice… a big ol’ Ice Axe.

….. and yes, it’s going to take some time for the rest of the group to even realize she’s missing. Sigh…. That’s gonna cost them. From this point forward, we move much as might be expected… running about the lodge, helter skelter with Parka Guy in hot pursuit. Our boy Eirik decides to ski for help…. but naturally he only manages to find poor Ingunn’s body out in the snow before Parka Guy smacks him silly with his good ol’ Ice Axe. We see Jannicke rise to become our main Heroine here, as she tries to keep her remaining two friends alive till help comes…..

Eventually they get whittled down, one by one, (remember, it’s just that sort of movie…..and it’s traditional…) and we get to a final showdown between Jannicke and Parka Guy out on the lonely snowy wastes beside a deep, almost bottomless chasm where it seems Parka Guy dispossess of his many victims. Will she win? Will Eirik and Jannicka work out their problems? Will crazy Parka Guy meet his bloody and well deserved end? Well Neko’s not gonna tell you… so there. However… I will say, there’s now a sequel to this one out, and Jannicke is in it so you can pretty much guess the ending.

So…. what’s my overall opinion of this one then? Remembering my general unease at slasher films in general, I can say “Fritt Vilt” ended up being better than I thought. For one thing, unlike the last such film I reviewed here at the Litterbox, the French effort “Frontier(s)”, this one actually did find that ever so important out of the way place to set their film in that you can actually beleive might allow a crazy killer to survive undiscovered. The landscape is rugged, and beautiful and certainly frightening enough in it’s stark frigid emptiness that we instantly accept the existance of Parka Guy without a doubt. Combine that with some excellent cinematography contrasting the bright white of the arctic exteriors with the dingy sepia toned darkness of the resort’s interiors and you truly can beleive in the set up of the story. That’s a big plus.

The acting is solid too. Jannicke is a good heroine, and you want her to win…. you really do. Even her friends are portrayed in a fashion that makes them sympathetic figures rather than the dispossable characters that usually inhabit such genre efforts.

If you were looking for a total bloodbath though, you might be disappointed though. The gore here is more believable than the over the top bloodshed now so common to other films. Neko actually liked that for a change, letting me focus on the film rather than the uneasy squirming I usually suffer through on these.

So…. In conclusion, Neko gives “Fritt Vilt” a solid 3 “Meows” out of 5 for doing a good job with the material, but I only wish they had come up with a new twist… something different to push it in a new direction. That would have given it another “Meow” easily… Oh, well….it’s certainly good enough for me to give the sequel a look see when it becomes available, and that’s high praise from this lil’ Catgirl.

Anchor Bay did an excellent job with their region 1 NTSC disc. The film comes uncut, as far as I can tell, letterboxed, and with both the original Norwegian Audio as well as a decent English dubbed track and separate English subtitles included if you choose. There’s even a “Making Of” featurette in Norwegian with those same excellent English subtitles throughout. Way to go Anchor Bay!

As always, loyal readers, Neko leaves you with the Trailer for this one so you can see for yourself….

And if this one is just the sort of creepy foreign film you like, then naturally you’ll want to take a look at the Trailer for the sequel “Fritt Vilt 2″, just out this year in theaters in Norway…..

The synopsis reads: “About 200 days prior to the college entrance exam, a school manages a cram course for its top 20 students. Evaluated only by their grades, school life is so stressful that some students suffer from serious mental problems. A sudden piano solo of “Fur Elise” wakes up the sleeping students and a screen shows the top student, Hye-yeong, dying in a water tank. A voice asks the students to solve a question, to decide the fate of Hye-yeong. Will she live or will she die? More importantly…. who will be next?”

Yep…. as any number of films have shown, school days in Korea can be Hell…. Literally. So with this trusty scenario in place who among you wouldn’t want to “Read On”?

“Death Bell” aka “Gosa”, is the feature film debut of former music video Director Yoon Hong-seung and the acting debut of singer Nam Gyoo-ri. Young actor Kim Beom was previously seen in the film “Hellcats” and the popular Korean TV sitcom “High Kick!”. The teachers are played by popular Korean actor Lee Beom-soo and actress Yoon Jeong-hee.

This one starts off with a very similar premise to another Korean school horror film, “D-Day”, with it’s atmosphere of stress, mental illness, and cutthroat competition for grades and that ever so important “class ranking” that separates the “winners” from the “losers” as ruthlessly as battlefield triage…. Its starts with one of the students in a terrifying nightmare featuring fire, blood and…. zombies. From there it only gets better.

Taking a page from “Saw”, this one teases us with an unseen murderer who traps the students, teachers, and staff inside the school during a Holiday, kidnapping the students one by one and forcing the others to solve insane questions while their classmate is tortured and eventually killed if they can’t solve the problem in time. The questions all seem to point to the tragic death of a former student and former #1 in the class rankings last year. Is it her ghost that is behind it all? ……Or is it something else?

This one plays with you as you watch it… Is it going to be a “Long Haired Ghost” story? Is it really a taut psychological examination of the pressures put on vulnerable students and the terrible ends it can drive them to in the pursuit of perfection? Then again it could be a modern revenge/slasher flick ala “Saw” or those Western Horror films like it. Turns out it’s all three……

Our heroine is Ina (played by Korean pop star Nam Gyu-ri) a popular female student, regarded by most as a loyal friend and well liked by all her classmates. When the horrors engulf them, she realizes that the students are all being killed in the order of their class ranking. Worse still, she knows her time is coming as she is ranked fifth in her class. Despite this, she tries to unravel the motives and identity of the murderer before more of her friends, especially her best friend, Myeong-hyo (played by Han Na-yeon), are killed.

Kang Hyun (played by Kim Beom) is Ina’s would-be boyfriend,the class clown and all around provocateur. He attends the special Holiday class merely to be near her. Unlike the other students who are completely overcome with terror, Kang remains cool; and this, coupled with his talents at computers, video and technical skills, may be the only way for the students to survive the cruel threat against them.

Add two teachers with differing ideas about handling their gifted, but often undisciplined students, (played by popular actor Lee Beom-soo and actress Yoon Jeong-hee) and a lone security guard/ groundskeeper (played by Lee Eol) and you have the elements necessary for that sort of claustrophobic terror that rules the plot here.

This one is unrelentingly bloody and vicious. A lot of reviewers seem to think almost shockingly so. For a Korean film, the violence didn’t seem that extreme to me…. and your Favorite Catgirl Reviewer has seen plenty. I found the earlier “Black House” to be far more graphic and bloody than “Gosa”. While not really a fan of the genre that has been dubbed “torture porn” by many, “Gosa” pulls off the horror with skill and style as opposed to those films that try to wield their shocks and scares with all the subtlety and finesse of a sledgehammer.

I wish I could say all was good in this one but eventually, the story does peter out, unfortunately. You, like Neko, will figure out who the killer is and why they are out for such extreme revenge about two thirds of the way through. Does that mean the film is a failure? Not really. As a parable about the Korean educational system and the extremes to which it has pushed the people all connected to it, it works and works well. There is a price to be paid for such singleminded pursuit of excellence merely for pursuits sake…. and it’s one that often than not takes a terrible toll on those who push themselves too far.

Neko gives “Gosa” 4 well deserved “Meows” out of 5 for doing the job a horror film is suppossed to do…. scare the bejeebits out of the audience. This one certainly does that and does it well. The Region 3 NTSC special edition 2 disc DVD is, as always, excellent, if a bit pricey at 29$ US. Only the film itself is subtitled into english, but the discs are top notch as always.

So… until next time, “Meow, Meow, for now!!”

And…. there’s a Trailer… of course!! (There’s always a Trailer…… Hehehehe!!!)

Our synopsis for this one reads as follows: “2007. The French presidential elections are a face-off between a conservative and an extreme right-wing candidate. The banlieues are ablaze. After a failed robbery, a gang of small-time crooks splits up and goes on the run from the police, some of them seeking refuge in a seedy hostel, deep in an industrial wasteland. Unbeknownest to the robbers, their hosts are a bunch of Neo-Nazi cannibals, who will go to any lengths to turn their fascist fantasies into reality. Our young protagonists’ ordeal begins and, subjected to all kinds of mutilation and torture, they learn the true meaning of universal suffrage.”

Well….. Nazis AND crazy cannibals…… Can Neko pass up giving this one a try? I don’t think so!! Let’s all “Read On”, shall we?

Let’s get all the “Tech Stuff” for this release out of the way…..

There….. Now as to the film itself.

Neko was really wondering if this film could actually pull it off. I mean, US films like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “The Hills Have Eyes” would have you believe that the deserted wastelands of the United States are just crawling with clans of mutant inbred cannibals….. and the sheer size of the US actually does make such completely uninhabited wilderness areas possible. It’s why such films work……. This works in Australia too…. or maybe the wilds of the old Eastern Bloc……. But France?…the Home of the flaky Croissant???

Could such places even be available to populate with these “Urban Myths”? Admittedly…. Neko-chan’s knowledge of France and it’s geography are more limited than say, her understanding of the jungles of Upcountry Thailand, but this premise seems at first glance to be a bit much to ask her to swallow……

Anyway….. since I get the feel that this is set in some “near future” almost apocalyptic time, I’m willing to play along and assume it’s not only possible, but downright likely.

So….. the story revolves around our heroine, Yasmina (Karina Tesra), who finds herself drawn into a stupid bank robbery plot masterminded by her brother, her ex-boyfriend and their mutual friend that gets her brother shot and killed. The rest of them are forced to flee, the police hot on their heels, so they split up and make a bee-line for the safety of Holland…. This means that they end up lost of course, somewhere on the “frontier” near that border where they decide to spend the night at an Inn run by some fairly unsavory characters, the Von Geisler family in the form of Aryan She Wolf, Gilberte (Estelle Lefébure); the twitchy, Klaudia (Amélie Daure); and their brute of a brother Goetz (Samuel Le Bihan).

Now…… Neko-chan has seen some dives in some movies before…. but this Inn screams “Run Like Hell!” in no uncertain terms. But do these people hear that warning creeping up the back of their neck like big hairy spiders? Nope….. but then in movies like this they never, ever do….

The guys think they’ve struck it lucky when the find out that Gilberte and Klaudia are a couple of horny sluts…. creepy, nasty sluts….. but sexy in that “bad girl” trailer trash sort of way that very stupid guys in slasher movies ALWAYS fall for. Things get tense following this, and the two guys end up as the first victims in what is going to be a very bloody encounter here.

Then Yasmina and her ex, Alex (Aurelien Wiik) arrive. They don’t know that things are amiss until they get to visit “the Farm”… and when Alex goes to the bathroom, he decides to look around, only to discover his friend’s body hanging upside down, hooked by his ankles like a slaughtered pig. Time to make a run for it…. but too late!!! The clan isn’t ready to let them go. Seems they need both “meat” and breeding stock…. Unfortunately their gene pool is getting a bit shallow…. there are tunnels full of mutant freaks in an abandoned maze of mining tunnels to attest to that. Yasmina isn’t all that Arayan….. but beggars can’t be choosers, even when trying to breed the “Master Race”.

From this point, we’re in familiar territory. The Nazi cannibals capture our heroes… they escape. They get chased and some creative bloody mayhem ensues. Yasmina gets caught.. again… There is the requisite horrible family dinner scene. Yasmina goes “Rambo” and escapes….. again. There is some more chasing…. sorta like in a very very blood spattered “Scooby-Doo” episode…. and we get eventually to the final, no holds barred fight to the death for the survival of Yasmina. Cue end credits.

And boy…. while we’re at it, these are some extremely well armed Nazi cannibals. Shotguns… Mauser rifles,….Lugers, a snazzy MP-40 submachine gun and even a freaking Bren Gun! If only they’d had some of those neat “potato masher” grenades they could have restarted WW2. Makes you wonder why they needed to resort to the standard maniac arsenal of sledgehammers, bolt cutters, and various pointy thingees.

This one moves along. It also takes absolutely no prisoners….. don’t expect it to wimp out and do very many off screen “suggestive” kills. Nope… this one likes to get in your face with the violence….and once it gets there it wants to kick your teeth in. Heck… they even cook a guy to death in some freaky steam cabinet like a lobster!! It reminded me why I don’t usually watch “slasher films”. For your Favorite Catgirl, they just creep me out too darn much. In the world today, they just strike too close to home for comfort. I’ll take a horde of hopping vampires to serial killers any day. “Frontier(s)” gave me a bad nights sleep…….

So… what then is my rating for this one? Well, given that I had my reservations at the start that this one was even possible, I’d say that by the end, it had me firmly convinced that I wont be visiting the pastoral French countryside any time soon…. Neko gives “Frontier(s)” a firm 4 “Meows” out of 5 for taking it’s admittedly silly premise and making it terribly, horribly real. In my opinion, any film that has me waking up all sweaty and scared at 3 in the morning has done it’s job as a horror movie.

Naturally…there’s a Trailer… so here goes!!