If you just saw this short list of at home flicks, you may assume I’ve been taking it fairly easy this week when in reality, it’s been a full blown onslaught of horror here in my Queen Anne abode. In theaters, I caught screenings of Dracula Untold and Fury (review Wednesday) but in preparation for tomorrow’s diligently researched “13 Most Disturbing Horror Movies of the Last 13 Years,” I’ve been charging through some of the most villainous stuff ever set to screen. Considering you’ll hear much more about those tomorrow, any entries that made the cut are not included in this Weekly Review write up. So though four monstrous entries have been omitted, here are those that didn’t qualify or quite made the cut. 

ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992)

First of all, let’s talk about how much I love Evil Dead II. In my mind, it’s the pinnacle of campy horror movie. It’s Sam Raimi’s oddball magnum opus. It’s perfect weird and wonderfully original. The first installment doesn’t work nearly as well for me, nor does this third one. Though there’s still a lot of the goofy stuff, like the legion of mini-Ashes, that worked so well for Evil Dead II, the medieval setting just doesn’t really work for me (especially in the somewhat anticlimactic finale) nor did Bruce Campbell‘s trumped up ego. It is responsible for some of the franchise’s best one-liners and it’s certainly a hell of a lot of fun but, nonetheless, it’s just not Raimi’s best. I know it’s a cinephile sin to not praise Army of Darkness to high heavens but, in my humblest of opinions, it just only works occasionally. Now we presumably must do battle. KNIVES OUT! (B-)

WOLF CREEK (2005)

A brutal take on backwoods shenanigans, the Australian Wolf Creek works as well as it does because of the rare narrative perspective it adopts. When the shit goes down – and it definitely goes down hard – we see the endeavor through the eyes of one solitary character with everything serving as a backdrop to the frantic clamber of a freed victim. Scrambling from one desolate set piece to another, Greg McLean uses the desolation of hodunk Australia take focus. Just sanguine-soaked enough to charm bloodbuffs and put off those not won over to the genre, Wolf Creek is one of the better installments to a sub-genre that’s all but gotten out of control. (B-)

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003)

Antagonist by design, Rob Zombie‘s debut shows a serious lack of restraint amidst a real penchant for this kind of twisted territory. Skinned bodies, rape shacks and just about a thousand corpses populate this demented shlock shock horror flick and, surprisingly enough, much of the fear Zombie gestates is palpable. His vision is strikingly unpleasant, his House of 1000 Corpses is truly a horror show to behold. True to his film’s namesake, there are a ludicrous amount of bodies, an insane amount of lecherous bloodlust and all kind of revolting freakshow displays. It’s a shame though that Zombie couldn’t divorce his overbearing music video aesthetic from his first film go. It would have fared much better without it. (C)

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Stanley Kubrick submitted his cut of Eyes Wide Shut a mere six days before he passed away. Though not a perfect film, Kubrick’s swan song is symbolic of his absolute technical mastery and his characteristically ruthless command over his cast. Tom Cruise shines in front of Kubrick’s lens, strolling through New York City streets as unsettling as the English canals of Clockwork Orange, but it’s co-star Nicole Kidman who really steals the show. Her deeply affected performance is haunting in its intoxicating candor, her jealousy and rage make her as unpredictable as any feral cat and she eats up her scene like figgy pudding over the holidays. Though Eyes Wide Shut doesn’t quite exist in the same horrifying category as The Shining or Clockwork, it’s a preeminently eerie product that is as unsettling as it is masked in deeper nuance.  (A-)

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