Buy ANYTHING Instead!

“An unheralded horror gem…Displays a raw talent reminscent of early George Romero and Sam Raimi.” -Fangoria

“One of the best, if not THE best horror flicks of the year.” -Bloody-Disgusting.com

“A creepy, old-fashioned 80’s sleep-over movie, with the perfect blend of blood, screams and scares.” -Eli Roth, Director of Cabin Fever

“B is for BORRRR-IIIIINNNGG.” -bisforbrains.com

Now that I have my initial childish remark out of the way, let’s get serious.

“The Roost” involves a group of uninteresting twenty-somethings (surprise surprise) on their way to a wedding. They wreck their SUV (surprise surprise) and seek help at a creepy house in the middle of nowhere (surprise surprise). The house has a barn out back full of bats, and after 43 painfully drawn-out minutes we find out the bats somehow turn people into zombies. WHY? Because zombies are hip right now, haven’t you noticed???

Now I could have easily forgiven the extremely typical scenario, the awful acting and the complete lack of thought process by every character if this movie would have at simply ENTERTAINED me. That’s right. To put it bluntly, “The Roost” is not entertaining. Here’s why:

1. Zero character development. Who are these people? If you aren’t going to bother intriguing us with the damn people on screen then at least kill them off in unique and fun ways!!! That leads us to…

2. Forgettable and relentlessly boring zombies, gore and death scenes. SPOILER WARNING: There is only ONE creative death in the whole mess, involving a stuntman running full speed out of the upper level of the barn and biffing it hardcore on the concrete. OUCH! Way to take one for the team buddy! END SPOILER. It’s too bad the rest of the movie isn’t worth while, because of the…

3. S…..L………O……………….W pacing and piss-poor-payoff. “The Roost” drags on and on as if everything that is happening on screen is the most important fucking thing you will ever see. To make matters worse, the only time there is any background music is when the bats are chasing people. I’m sure they attempted this to give the film more of a “realistic” or “gritty” effect, but instead it just made it an absolute chore for me to keep watching. However, the movie does break things up a little bit, bringing us to…

4. Blatant and unrelated attempts to spice things up. There are a few genuinely sweet black and white segments with a TV host talking to the viewer and actually giving them something to get excited about! Now why am I listing this as a reason this movie is not entertaining? Because these tiny little parts are actually BETTER than the movie itself!!! They end up being nothing but a tease. If they would have just kept this idea and ditched everything else I would be a much, much happier camper right now. But alas…

5. It kills itself with its own sparse sense of humor. Now don’t get me wrong, I love humor in my horror movies. Read some of my other reviews if you have any doubts of that. But “The Roost” wanders aimlessly through being a tongue-in-cheek campy good time and a serious, gory exploitation film. Problem is, it’s not gory enough to give the gross-out fans anything to gawk about and it’s not cheesy enough to give a continuous flow of laughs.

There you have it. Five (5) solid reasons why this movie isn’t worth your time. The only reason I’m not putting this in the bottom of the bisforbrains.com gutter is because I liked the intro. Consider this B-ball DROPPED.

BARN-BIFF: Yikes, that smarts!
HORROR-HOST: Cut out the film and just put these together please.
?????: I honestly can’t think of anything else.

Buy it…for some odd reason.

When you run a movie review site such as this one, you’re bound put yourself through a relentless amount of torture every now and then. But that’s the risk we at b4brainz are willing to take.

Wolfhound has something to do with an American writer that has just arrived in Ireland. He’s staying at his late parents humble ol’ abode in order to garner some inspiration for his next novel. Problem is, he’s brought his wife and kids along with him…bad idea buddy, haven’t you ever seen The Shining? His wife is a sporadic bipolar nut-case, which sounds exciting written down but it’s really not. The kids are…kids. There are a number of mangy dogs lingering around the supposed-to-be-beautiful-but-we-never-get-to-enjoy-it Irish setting. But the crusty canines are more than what they seem: through Michael Jackson music video style transformation they can morph into virulent voluptuous vixens!

The wolfbabes seduce the writer, and through some kind of insanely-overactive woman’s intuition his wife IMMEDIATELY knows he cheated on her. Then they fuss and fight, spend plenty of time hating each other, bicker bicker bicker….yawn. It turns out the writer is also a wolfhound, and in order to find his true spirit he has to have some supposedly “kinky” sex with them. Sound exciting again? Nope! If the director seriously thinks this boring shit is “kinky,” his head would explode if he were to spend a mere 30 seconds looking up “BDSM” on Google. Eventually there is a nonsensical showdown between the writer and another male wolfhound. We find out everyone in town is a wolfhound. Credits roll.

Yeah, it’s bad. Really bad. And not good-bad. Bad-bad. Terrible-bad. Awful-bad. Every possible synonym for the word “bad”-bad. Now you ask, “Can it really be THAT bad?” And my answer is yes, it’s that unspeakably-bad…unless all you want to see are the occasional fake pair of breasts, then it’s not quite as bad-bad.

Judging from the previous paragraph it is apparent my intelligence level has dropped tremendously after watching Wolfhound.

When it comes down to it, this damned movie is simply caught in limbo between crappy Skinemax style porn and Were-Horror. Do yourself a favor when you see Wolfhound at the rental store: Pick up the box and look at the fantastic cover illustration by Luis Royo. Then put it back down and spend your money on something else…like a pack of Bazooka® brand bubble-gum. That would be FAR more entertaining and wouldn’t leave you with such a horrible aftertaste.

A little nudity is all that saves this from getting the lowest of low reviews…though fake brainless centerfolds do nothing for me, personally. How in the world did they get Royo to paint for this garbage!?!?!?

FAKE BREASTS?: Might be a payoff for some people I guess.
PLAYMATES?: See above.
COVER ART?: Only good thing in the whole mess.

Waist your money on it here!

I feel like my patience has just gone through the most painfully rigorous test imaginable.

For those not in-the-know, Conjure is a horror flick from the “Rock Star of Illustration,” Matt Busch. Even if you’ve never heard Busch’s name, you have more than likely seen his work on everything from Star Wars to The Crow to The Lord of The Rings. Being an artist myself, I truly admire his incredible talent and style. This movie on the other hand is an entirely different story.

The plot is a thrown-together (literally, watch the extras) cluster-fuck of mammoth proportions. Matt runs across an old photograph of a castle while wandering through a graveyard. It was “calling his name,” so he took it and decided to paint it. After beginning the painting, he and his foxy-wife-with-an-attitude, Sarah, begin to have strange experiences. They hear slowed-down and reversed voices, beverages slide across tables, you know, the usual. They eventually get sucked into the painting and wake up in front of the creepy old castle, and that’s when the movie really picks up…uhhh…not really.

Everything about this movie is bad in the worst kind of way. The acting is terrible and so stone-dry it’s rarely amusing. The ghosts are the very definition of generic, with their tattered clothes, white make-up and darkened eyes. Not to mention they are a blatant rip-off of The Ring, with frames removed from their motion to make them “jump” towards the viewer. The soundtrack is an obtrusive annoyance of royalty free stock-horror garbage. Star Wars wipes are used to transition from scene to scene. And worst of all, it doesn’t seem like a mere 3 minutes can go by without a “scary” flash-frame image of a lame ghost or scrawled-on-wall, complete with a loud TV-interference blast of noise. Seriously, if they took all the flash-frame images out of this movie and put them side by side, I bet it would make a 10-minute animation. Of course, the animation wouldn’t really be an “animation” because all of the flash-frames are nearly identical.

Speaking of repetition, we get to see Matt browse through his “scary” little necronomicon-style sketchbook over, and over, and over, and over… There are never any new drawings to see either, he will simply flip through the same 3 or 4 drawings! This happens repeatedly throughout the entire sorry excuse for a movie!

Watching the making of and behind the scenes footage on the DVD makes it an even bigger disaster. Matt, Sarah and crew really feel like they have made a good, scary low-budget movie. Matt praises Sarah’s PATHETIC acting, Shawn Sheehan (the “let’s use After-Effects everywhere we possibly can” guy) praises everything that Matt does, and Matt himself goes on and on about how proud he is of it. It’s really just a big complementary circle of vomit-inducing fluff.

Now about Matt and his self-indulgent attempt at filmmaking…the beginning has a documentary style introduction of who Matt is, how he grew up, and takes a look at the high-profile illustration career he’s had. He explains in the making of that he decided to put this in the movie because he wasn’t sure people would know he is. WHO CARES WHO YOU ARE MATT!!! This is a horror movie, not an E! True Hollywood Story! Concentrate on THE MOVIE, concentrate ON A DECENT SCRIPT!!! It really seems like it’s only there to appease Matt’s ego, and it’s one of about 50 things in Conjure that irritates me to no end.

The only people that could find any kind of enjoyment out of this movie are the Matt Busch fanboys. Chances are, even they will probably want to pound their head against the wall repeatedly while watching it. Hopefully Matt actually PLANNED OUT his next movie that’s in the works, otherwise the world is going to have another throw-away piece of plastic like this to deal with. However, there were two moments in this movie that gave me an enormous laugh, and I’ve made them available below. Do yourself a favor and just watch these two clips so you don’t have to torture yourself with the rest!

So Matt, if you happen to read this, stick to the illustration buddy!

MEDIA: (Quicktime 7 required)
Matt Busch being, like…possessed or something.
Thrilling suspense involving a knife.

SCARY GHOSTS?: If you’ve never seen a horror movie.
STORYLINE?: Made up on the fly and boy does it show.
MATT BUSCH?: Pick up your pencil and brush again!

Buy something MUCH better here!

THE DEAD WILL RISE AGAIN…

…AND RIDE HORSES…

In a surrealistic horror setting, a young Preacher’s assistant goes mad and becomes lost in a fantasy of her own creation. The woman, Grace, creates a world in which her either dead or missing father is present, quite loving, and lives with her on a fabricated ranch. In her mind, Grace’s father will stop at nothing to protect his daughter’s best interests…. including murder. Stars academy award-winner Edmond O’Brien as Grace’s father.

That’s a quick summary of the plot and I dare not go in any further. In fact, the best thing i can say about this horrid piece of work is that the summary ends up sounding quite good. Avoid this movie like you would avoid a swarm of bees; if you see it on a store shelf run away screaming and flailing your arms… and then jump in a pond and use a straw to breath with until you pass out and hopefully you will forget you ever saw the box.

I can only theorize that there is a more gruesome and nudity-intense version of this movie out there somewhere, because the one I saw could nearly be show on Sesame Street. The box is terribly misleading and promises what looks like a bloodied limb-less park ranger zombie screaming in agony. It turns out that the only “gore” in the entire movie is the one time that you will even manage to open your eyes more than a 3rd of the way.

So, to save you the time, here it is (be sure you turn your speakers WAY up to catch the cartoonthoomp ): purely putrid (Quicktime 7 required -> get it )

Again, stay away, stay far away.

HUMOR: dead silence………………..
VIOLENCE: a few tumble weeds roll by…..
NUDITY: cricket chirps…. more cricket chirps…..