Three Films Make A Post Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla

La Hora Fria aka The Dark Hour [sic] (2006): A tiny group of survivors huddles together in a bunker in a world destroyed by a terrible war. Zombie-like infected and stranger things roam around and the usual post-apocalyptic stuff happens, until everything comes to a not stupid, but somewhat useless twist ending.

This Spanish movie may be derivative of every semi-serious post-apocalypse film ever made, but it is well enough executed, and solidly acted, which makes it a bit better than the sub-genre's average. Of course, with a little more courage to stray from the well-trodden path, this could have been great instead of solid.

 

The Kindred (1987): How much pleasure one can take away from this rather slow and boring thing about a scientist without any character to speak of and his similarly "interesting" team coming to grips (in a monster killing sense) with the fact that his dead mother has used his genes in a dubious hybridization experiment probably depends on how inclined one is to drudge through plodding scenes of nothing at all happening to get to about ten minutes of fun. Of course, the fun does consist of a big tentacle monster, Amanda Pays turning into a Deep One, a wee tentacle monster hiding itself away in a water melon and the words "and you call yourself a scientist.". It's just too bad that you could cut half of the film without changing more about it than its running time.

For the truly perverse, there's also Rod Steiger collecting a pay check.

 

Mole (2001): I'm usually pretty hard on contemporary backyard horror filmmaking, but I found this one about a reporter, her cameraman and an Internet "expert" on the New York subway stumbling through some dark, decayed tunnels looking for a story about the homeless living there to be a pretty decent film.

The acting's mostly serviceable, the locations are dark, damp and smelly looking and the director/writers (one of whom - Anthony Savini - seems to have quite a body of work as assistant cameraman) are clever enough to know that urban decay is the star of their show. The ending doesn't work as well as it must have looked on paper, but at least its trying to be poignant.

 

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