A Horror Film Blog

 After watching Mickey Keating's Offseason I decided to check out more of his work, so I watched Carnage Park.  I'm glad to report it is another win - a slick micro-budget thriller centred on brilliant performances by Ashely Bell as the hapless victim of terrible misfortune, and the genius of sound designer Sean Duffy.  Keating helps out a bit as well. Vivian is not having a good day. First, the obvious criticism - this is nothing original.  A bank heist goes wrong and two hoodlums try to escape with a hapless woman - wrong place at the wrong time, lady! - in the truck.  Their flight to Mexico is cut short when they blunder into a cheerful local psychopath's devil's playground. Thus far, we could be watching any number of cheap and cheerless Tarantino or Rodriguez knock offs.  Keating signals his influences cheerfully - there are about half a dozen references or borrowings from Reservoir Dog s and From Dusk Till Dawn in the two sentences above, and Keatin...

 This film answers the all important question that I know has been keeping many of us awake at night: what would have happened if Jean Luc Godard had decided to make horror films? That might sound frivolous but I can't think of any other way to characterize this remarkable film.  It might be the greatest  Nouvelle Vague  film made outside of France.  It feels like some strange piece of Euro art-horror, only it (thankfully) eschews the 'artistic' nudity and 'daring' sexual transgressions that that pretty much goes hand-in-hand with the territory. A woman arrives in a small town and immediately hooks up with some dissolute bohemian types.  It turns out the locals are all vampires, or zombies, or something like that.  There is a lot of nothing happening for ages, and then scenes where things happen but don't really seem to make sense.  It feels like key moments or important dialogue has been carelessly left on the cutting room floor ... And if that s...