Infamous horror director whose reputation continues to baffle me. Yuzna has a couple of respected horror films to his name, but I find his work sloppy and cheap. A must for fans of the horror genre, but keep your expectations low.
Movies
After having seen the first one, I immediately skipped to the fourth entry in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, mainly because it was directed by Brian Yuzna. Not that I'm the biggest Yuzna fan, but he usually manages to add something unique to his films. He certainly succeeded here. What started out as a slasher series becomes a weird, occult creature flick. Ricky (from the first film) still hangs around, but part 4 is about a cult of women who are all about being reborn and getting rid of men. The cult's latest victim is Kim, an aspiring journalist who struggles to land a serious job. The performances are really bad and the plot makes no sense at all, but the effects are quite gruesome and the body horror is a pleasant surprise. This is not by any means a great flick, but the second half has some pretty freaky scenes, and it doesn't take too long before the madness starts. Fans of body horror and/or creepy crawlers should definitely check it out.Read all
60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero
Another micro-shorts anthology. They were relatively popular for a while, but they rarely lived up to their potential. With just a single minute to make an impression, directors were given a tricky challenge. One that proved a bit too daunting for most involved, as too many of the entries failed to make an impact. There are some interesting names here, but few of them stand out. The goals of the project are lofty, but it's all very conceptual and the films themselves never really match or strengthen the project's ideals. It's a good thing that the score is pretty interesting, which at least kept me going. Not all that interesting.Read all
The final 20 minutes provide some crazy, over-the-top horror fun, it's just that the 75 minutes leading up it weren't half as entertaining. The film is too easy to read, the actors are pretty bad and the wait for the finale is tiresome, but at least this film delivers at the end. Sadly it's not enough to fully redeem this mess.
Not that I expected great things from this film, with Yuzna it's always best to prepare for a hefty dose of kitsch. The promise of a more fantasy-fueled horror film and Yuzna's tendency to go out all did make me curious. It's a shame the result just isn't all that great, because I really wanted to like this film more. Plenty of good intentions, but the budget simply wasn't there. The effects look horrendous, the nu-metal soundtrack was utterly ridiculous, and the performances are just horrible. It's a mess of a film, but if you look through the poor delivery you can see the bright potential of something that never came to be.Read all
