I could not imagine watching a movie on my IPod ("Honey, I downloaded The Bridge On The River Kwai, for our return flight").
I don’t even get into watching flicks on my computer. I don’t have a very big screen. However I have caught some South Park episodes I had missed and I’ve watched some documentaries I couldn’t find on DVD (I don’t wanna download ‘em, just watch ‘em. This website Movies Found On Line has some good stuff).
If it's suppose to look like a Youtube video then the handheld fake-documentary works on my small screen as well.
I recently watched George Romero’s latest zombie soap-opera Diary Of The Dead on line for free (I forget where I found it, but vidserp.com is a place to start).
I kinda enjoyed the new one. It’s nothing great, I barely remember it now. It was a big improvement over Romero’s last one, that lame-ass Land Of The Dead. Hey it was free, maybe had I gone and seen it in the theater or even rented it, I might of been pissed off, on the laptop, it was watchable.
It’s another of the Blair Witch Project/ Cloverfield fake documentaries. Though it might hold up even less then those two in the ‘actors believably holding the camera’ department.
Going back to Spinal Tap or Man Bites Dog (or The (British) Office TV series etc.) I’m a sucker for the genre, I think the style can bring a realism to horror flicks that can often feel to slick and glossy for me. Matt Barone of Good Magazine calls them “Handheld Horror Movies’.
Speaking of which, I found on Google video a perfectly watchable copy of the Spanish fake-doc/zombie flick [REC] (as in ‘record’). This flick was scary, it had me stressed with tension and dread. It stars the very adorable Manuela Velasco (from Pedro Almodóvar’s Law Of Desire) as a TV reporter following a firefighter crew around for the night. They all get stuck in a Quarantined building that seems to have a dangerous virus attacking the residents (here’s a better summery and a rave review by Philip French of The Observer).
Director Jaume Balagueró also made the flawed but creepy flick The Nameless (1999). Rocket just got it on DVD. It’s frustrating because the idea and atmosphere of are interesting, a desperate Mother gets a phone call from her long dead daughter and go on a quest to find her, taking her into the twisted world of Nazi religious cults, perversions of science and child molesting freaks and other assorted nastiness. Unfortunately it’s kinda bogged down by people always stopping to explain load of information to the mother and her retired cop partner. It also uses this cheap (Ring style) noise and static in the scene cuts to make up for a lack of real scares.
But [REC] is definitely worth checking out on line (for free), because I’ve heard no mention of it opening up here or coming out on DVD, There’s already an american remake in the works (slated to hit theaters in October) called Quarantine directed by
John Erick Dowdle who directed another fake-horror-doc I wouldn't mind checking-out called The Poughkeepsie Tapes, I saw previews for it last year but it never opened.
I’m also hoping to find a bootleg of the Slamdance fake-horror-doc Paranormal Activity that got some “"it will scare the pants off you" reviews.
Twitch.com reported Dreamworks bought it, but appear to not want to release it.
Oh goody, they just to remake it.
-sweeneyrules
