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Reviews
House of Flesh Mannequins (2009)
Great low budget
I must have been at the same screening as the previous reviewer. I am in no way affiliated with the film or A Night Of Horror film festival ... and certainly wouldn't be ashamed to be as I thought the exact opposite of the guy that made the previous post.
The film is uncomfortable at times, shocking at other times and sure it is low budget too (money doesn't just fall out of the sky into an artist's lap, y'know) BUT it is highly original and a hell of a lot of fun to watch.
Good to see a film that also has something to say, I think seeing this film was a rewarding experience. The filmmaker's took a chance and attempted to do something different and while the film is not faultless, it certainly isn't a failure. Not for everybody, not for the faint of heart, not for those that want a big budget Hollywood schlock-buster, but if you want to see something unique and different you could certainly do worse
Down (2001)
Awesomely Sick! Contains SPOILERS Dude!
Sometimes a film can totally take the viewer by surprise and deliver a standard of entertainment one thought was only possible in dreams. Yes, I am talking about "The Shaft", also known simply and dramatically as "Down", quite a clever title when we consider the function of the elevator that is central to the film's storyline
but let's not forget that elevator's can also bring us back "Up" again and one wonders if that title hadn't been used for a Russ Meyer soft-core sex-romp whether that name would have better described the pure elation one feels when viewing a film like this one.
The film is set in New York in a giant skyscraper. I think I would enjoy visiting New York as it looks much like my hometown of Sydney. The entrance to the skyscraper looks just like Martin Place, the street it's on looks just like George Street and everybody in New York has Australian accents. Something tells me this movie was not actually shot in the city that never sleeps. Never mind, who will ever know? Right? The first scene in the elevator is a real hoot. There's like these 7 pregnant chicks in the elevator, right? They are totally knocked up, buns in the oven, Preggos as all hell. Anyway, you wouldn't read about it but the elevator gets stuck between falls. So I'm thinking "Awesome! I hope this turns into a movie about a 7-way pregnant-lesbian-elevator-orgy." But this is where the movie twists
Almost immediately two of the broads go into labor, right? There's screaming, and suffocation and placenta everywhere when the elevator finally reaches it's destination and opens up on some unsuspecting Australian Americans.
Now for some reason the elevator gets really p-ssed, maybe because they couldn't scrub the afterbirth off the carpet
I don't know,I'm open for suggestions here
but it gets real mad and starts killing random people. Like the blind guy who likes to grope his hair dresser Shazza, he's really a dirty old lecher so she dies his hair green to get even with him. But get this, because he's so firkin blind he can't tell his hair is the color of pea-soup. Lol! And then him and his guide dog actually walk into the elevator shaft and there's no elevator there and they totally plummet to the death. Rotfl! Okay, so you are probably thinking "How can an elevator get mad? Elevator's don't get mad, they don't have feelings, they don't have brains!" But that's what I love about good science-fiction they have answers for everything. So, there's this German professor who got kicked out of the military for experimenting on computers made out of dolphin brains, and now he works at the elevator company and has built an evil elevator with a giant brain for a computer that gets really emotional and likes to kill Australian Americans living in New York. Now that's called artificial intelligence, man
Just think one day a giant computer with a dolphin's brain could write a movie like this. Sick! Awesome cast. Naomi Watts, she's an Aussie like me, actually I knew her when I was a kid
she lived around the block and we used to hunt koala bears together. Although these days we know that koalas aren't really bears at all. Ron Perlman plays the head of the Elevator company, remember he was really cool as Vincent the guy who lived in the sewers and had a lion-face in that old show "Beauty And The Beast". Oh, and Michael Ironside is the German scientist, he was in Scanners. For the uninitiated, Scanners was the movie that popularized the "exploding-head" genre of film-making.
Did I mention the witty script? Sometimes I forget the important stuff but there is great dialog throughout. When journalist Naomi is told to make her elevator stories "juicy" by the newspaper's editor she replies "I'll pee on them". That's funny, that's just like something I would said. When he discovers the computer has the ability to reproduce one character exclaims "Machines and computers do not reproduce. Have you ever seen two chips f--king?" When Naomi falsely accuses an elevator mechanic of raping her the cop turns to the mechanic and says "Wow, You've got taste." Gold! When one mechanic doubts the suicide of the blind man the other confirms "Why not? I would, if I had green hair".
Action abounds including severed torsos and even a beheading just like they used to do in the eighties. The special effects were way ahead of their time, remember this movie was made 5 years ago and blue-screening technology was in it's infancy so you may have to squint a little to make it look authentic. Oh yeah, there's this awesome roller-blading scene, if you don't know what roller-blading is you may have to ask your parents if they remember the nineties
that reminds me of this cool joke my girlfriend Wiz told me
"What's the hardest part of roller-blading? Telling your parents you're gay!" Ha ha ha.