Let me be the first to deem The Alamo Drafthouse Downtown’s "Best of Cinemuerte Film Festival" a complete success. Running on the week leading up to Halloween, each night of Cinemuerte saw an impressive turn out of fans hell bent on macabre viewing pleasure. Not taking away from the event itself, I would like to offer my opinions of some of the movies I saw.

ZERO DAY:

Ok, here’s the concept. What if the two kids who shot up Columbine High School had made an extensive video diary leading up to their attacks? Combined with security camera footage from the attack itself, this would make an interesting movie right? (At least in a car-wreck interesting sort of way.) Well, all you have to do then is make a movie about two more kids in a different town who do the same thing, and present it in home-video format with an ending scene that is shown from the POV of their school’s video security system. Surely this wouldn’t come across as a completely unoriginal piece of crap that had only the exploitation of a national tragedy going for it. The blonde kid who played the "bottom" of the two (antagonists? protagonists?) had a few bright spots, and I may not have minded "topping" him myself. Other than that, piss on this flick.

ISLAND OF THE DAMNED aka WHO COULD KILL A CHILD:

This movie was quite a charmer, and completely discounts everything I’m going to say about foreign films in my next review of THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU. In a nutsack, a married couple travels to an obscure island off the coast of (Spain?) only to discover that the children inhabitants have gone ape-shit, killing all of the adults. The driving conflict here is the couple’s reluctance to fight back against the kids, for fear of hurting a child. Being a parent myself, I can assure you that I would love to be thrust into such a situation, relishing the opportunity to mow down an army of psychotic youths. This movie was Children of the Corn back when Stephen King was a child himself. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU:

Before reviewing this film, I must give you a disclaimer concerning my closed mindedness when it comes to watching foreign movies. Usually when I see a foreign film, I am reminded of only one thing: That we as Americans should be hell bent on destroying all other cultures in the world, and replacing them with our own. This being said, I must now mince words because I would hate to offend Larz, who is the host of Weird Wednesdays, as well as my neighbor. He screened this film and seemed rather fond of it, so I need to be careful here.
This movie was an unforgivable piece of shit. A syphilitic turd smeared across the screen, this crapper doesn’t even belong in the "so bad it’s good" category that many of Weird Wednesday’s features fill so well. Oh sure, there was the "creative cinematography" and "ground breaking camera angles" that critics often use to gloss over a pretentious, artsy-fartsy shitter like this one, but I feel like the director should have gone into wildlife photography or something... anything that wouldn’t have been such a monumental waste of time. Oh yeah, the movie was about some crazy bitch who can’ tell if she’s in a satanic cult or not. On the bright side, Larz did play a clip of said crazy bitch fucking a goat in one of her previous opuses.