Screener Queen Reviews – By LAW

Review of :“Clinger” and “Dark Moon Rising”

Preview of “Ich Sei, Ich Sei”

So we’re on the countdown to Halloween here in the stables, so we thought we’d take a dip into some new horror releases that definitely will not be making it to the big screen. First up is “Clinger”, penned by Gabi Chennisi Duncombe and Bubba Fish and directed by Michael Steves, who all went to high school together and made short movies a la Dawson, Pacey and Joey Potter in Dawson’s Creek. Clinger started life as a kickstarter campaign, which makes sense to me after watching it on so many levels. The premise of the film is girl dates guy she doesn’t really like, on the night she is going to dump him he makes his grand romantic gesture during which he manages to accidentally behead himself (?) and then things go from bad to worse when he returns as a love-sick ghost to kill her so they can be together for all eternity. So far, so unoriginal. Clinger is a pastiche of shlock horror comedies of the 80’s and early 90’s. Borrowing from such luminaries as “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “ Critters”, Clinger is so badly acted that it is very hard to distinguish if the film is making fun out of itself or not. However, I truly believe there is a great drinking game to be created from this hot mess and I intend to work on it between now and October 31st.

“Dark Moon Rising” is an altogether different affair in that it takes itself deadly seriously. A few years ago werewolf films seemed all the rage with “Ginger Snaps”, “Dog Soldiers” and the grand daddy of them all, the “Twilight” quadrilogy. Dark Moon Rising borrows heavily from 80’s movies too, mainly trying to copy the vibe of The Lost Boys (in the fairground scene I was just waiting for the opening strains of “Cry Little Sister…”), with the band of wayward shape shifting werewolves that appear in a small town in search of a mysterious girl who is re-born once every 2,000 years. In order to save their kind from the brink of extinction, they must capture her before she becomes a full-fledged Lycan and reclaim her place as the Alpha species. Writer/Director Justin Price has created a hybrid mash-up of werewolf meets x-men, with his wolves having the ability to control the weather, infect their victims with venom and other numerous powers that make them deadly. However, Dark Moon Rising is a movie whose plot is almost completely indecipherable. It also suffers from a cast made up completely of the worst actors money could buy, but at times you might be fooled into thinking that maybe they were all given the scripts to several different movies that have no link to one another, such is the disconnect between the dialogue. This is supposedly the first in a trilogy, but it would seem any sequels will be slow to be produced with such a universally derided movie.

However, horror fans, all is not lost with Austrian Horror Ich Sei, Ich Sei (Goodnight Mommy) leading the competition for scariest film of the year. Written and directed by Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala, it was selected as the Austrian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards. The film finds 9-year-old twin brothers living in a secluded modern home in the Austrian countryside. Their mother (Susanne Wuest), or a woman purporting to be, returns home with a bandage-wrapped face after cosmetic surgery. However, the supposed mother begins acting in ways that make the boys, Lukas and Elias, question the identity of who might actually lie behind all the gauze. Following a long tradition of scary ass twins ( see “The Shining” and “Dead Ringer”), this movie is guaranteed to have you jumping in your seats and peeking through your fingers.