Nightmares Haunted Attraction: Dark Valentine (Review)

Coming off the high from my previous off season haunted house experience, it didn't take long for me to get my fix ASAP. The Raven and the Black Cat offered me the opportunity to check out a haunted attraction that wasn't on my radar but definitely made me a follower for years to come. Welcome to Nightmare Dark Valentine.

So with "Special K" and TRATBC in tow, we mini roadtripped out to Passaic, NJ to check out their off season Valentine's Day haunt and it definitely didn't disappoint.

It's not often I trek across the river, but I'm willing to get my haunt on anytime and any place. The place being Brighton Asylum, a location in itself that's spooky as hell. The thing that separates about haunts in Jersey seems to be the massive space they get to occupy compared to their NYC counterparts. Nightmares Dark Valentine, which has previously offered Halloween and Christmas variants seems to take full advantage of this location.

Entering through a massive warehouse, I saw a clear Valentine's Day theme going. Balloons, hearts and a miner.Wait a miner? Say what?  It seems the Dark Valentine theme here was inspired by the movie My Bloody Valentine 3D. On display were photo ops with "The Miner" (part of a contest on their Facebook page) as well as wardrobe attire from the movie Warm Bodies. It's always good to have a haunt align themselves with the horror flicks that are currently out.

As Special K and RATBC enter the haunt, it's a pitch darkness within a maze of darkened corridors that gets you a bit uneasy. In one dark hallway, I bumped into a figure I think may have been an actual human being OR a mannequin. I still don't know. You start to put your hand in front of you to figure out what direction to go to. It seems the total blackout effect is a lost art in haunted houses and here, they've brought in back and it works damn well.

Each of the rooms has it's own personality. Some of the rooms have hanging electrical wire, others with corpses and others with who knows what. The "jump scares" where actors seem to BOO! you out of nowhere were very well designed appearing via window slots and from the corner of a dark room.

And they don't just shout a quick scare and let you go. No no no. Some of our "miner" slashers decided to follow us across rooms. I had a very curious miner complete with a jumpsuit and gas mask follow me around as I pushed hanging dead corpses at him. It's kind of fun to see how they'll react.

Another room that stood out was a bench that gave you a different angle on seeing some dead bodies. It was quite inventive and I haven't been thrilled like that in a long time at a traditional haunted house. A few more rooms had some pesky silent but deadly children as well as a woman looking for blood donations.

All in all, the ending was not as jump-tastic as I would hoped but the most surprising thing I encountered was that Special K, The Raven and the Black Cat and I went through the entire 40 minute or so haunt all my ourselves. We never ran into the group in front of us and the group behind us never snuck up and crowded us. It was timed well and flowed brilliantly.

Nightmare Dark Valentine was the rare haunted house that takes a theme and embraces it. They paced the groups so that everybody was able to have their alone time with the haunt, the pitch black corridors added a level of terror I haven't seen in a long time and the creativity was new and exciting.

If this is the effort they put in an off season haunt, I can't wait to check out what they do during Halloween. Hopefully they won't wait that long and we'll see a few off season events to bridge the gap.

The Vitals...

• Brighton Asylum is located at 2 Brighton Ave Passaic, NJ 07055 Exit 154 off Garden state Pkwy South (located on Clifton border)
• Check out the official site
• Check out the Facebook page
• Follow their Twitter page

Categories: haunted house, my bloody valentine 3D, new jersey, valentine's day

The WTF List: Avatar Edition

So on a cold, frigid day last week I went to see the overly hyped, groundbreaking behemoth that is Avatar. What can you say that hasn't been said already? I dug the Real D awesomeness but the story was equivalent to a high school film club pitching potential Star Trek episode ideas.

Insano Steve said it best. It's the same rehashed story they use for every other movie. Dumb, stoopid guy has to join group and learn their ways. Meets girl. Likes girl. Gets in fight with girl's pseudo BF (he's a douche) and pseudo BF makes fun of guy. Girl sees this. He wins girl. Big fight ensues. He has to choose old culture or new culture. He chooses new culture. The End.

But damn those effects are spec-fuckin-tacular. So without further ado, it's the WTF list: Avatar Edition! Spoilers Ahoy.

1.) Really? 5 3D previews in a row? Jeezus...those piranhas look fake
2.) I haven't even put on my Real D glasses and I have a headache already
3.) Well, color me impressed. The virtual displays look holodecky
4.) Damn, these be tall motherfuckers
5.) Have we not learned from our mistakes? Guess not. USA! USA! USA!
6.) I am mesmerized by colorful, spinning bugs
7.) Dude! I see Na'vi boobage!
8.) So are there like Samoan, fat Na'vi?
9.) This is reminding me of the time Sigourney Weaver tried saving Gorillas in the Mist
10.) These rhino-elephant creatures are very awe-ish. So is the rainbow plant life.
11.) Giovanni Ribisi is the best overacting actor of our generation
12.) Dude, it's like Top Gun but with dragony creatures. Maverick this is Goose...
13.) Holy Shit! They gonna do it!!! They gonna hook up their tentacles, use a condom bro
14.) The whole Native American angle is a bit overused...couldn't we just give them some whiskey and wait a few generations (oh snap! He just didn't say that)
15.) Ewoks vs Empire all over again...and yet somehow we all believe this is plausible
16.) Great job USA, you blew up a tree. Pat yourself on the back.
17.) So is Jake Sully....Obama or am I reading too much in to this. You the chosen one!
18.) Well this be my first 3D action flick and I'm loving every minute of it
19.) Damn, America can't even win a war in a movie, we suck
20.) I now have a slight headache but I'll admit Avatar is very breathtaking visually

21.) FYI. Michelle Rodriguez in a tank top is visually yumminess

If I have to give this a spinkick rating it be 3. I mean the last 3D flick I saw was My Bloody Valentine and the gimmick use of this format in that flick was slightly entertaining.

But James Cameron seems like the guy to be the chosen one to lead us into this new tech. I mean he made tall, blue smurfs look and feel "real". And you gotta give him his props. But that's the thing. Even the Star Wars fans know Lucas can't write or pen any sensible dialogue and Cameron seems to suffer from "Dialogue and plot may be regurgitated but this shit be in 3D!".

Avatar is simply visual eye candy that has pushed the envelope that we will now all be watching movies in funny sunglasses for the foreseeable future. Sigh.

Categories: 3d, avatar, my bloody valentine 3D, the wtf list

My Bloody Valentine 3D (Review)

My Bloody Valentine 3D

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)

Directed by Patrick Lussier

[this review is brought to you by Insano Steve who threw his 3D glasses at the screen at the end of the movie]

So, last week I saw "My Bloody Valentine" (in amazing 3D!). The thing is, I should know better, and I really do know better.

But I just can't help it. I'm hype's bitch.

The deal was the jaded viewer and I would go see either "Notorious" or this shit, whichever one got better reviews. Surprisingy, Valentine won 58% to 53%.

This movie was selling out theatres, which is quite rare for horror. However, that is actually a bad sign. Any horror movie that can cross over and appeal to mainstream viewers is likely gonna be cheezy and dumb, with all those WB-type actors. But hey man, .... this shit's in 3D!

Boring Plot-O-Matic

"Plot": 10 years ago, the usual ignorant teens are getting drunk in a mine, when some psycho miner kills a bunch of them and leaves the rest scarred for life. The cops kill psycho, but the town's kinda small and shitty so they never got over it.

One of the surviving teens, Tom, freaks out, and leaves town. The "actor" who plays Tom is just awful. Anyhow, 10 years later (hey, that's present day!), Tom comes back to the shit-town, to try to hook up with his old girlfriend, who's now married to the douchebag sheriff.

But alas, as soon as Tom returns, people start getting killed again, miner-style.

Did the psycho rise from the dead? Could the killer be Tom or the douche sheriff? Maybe the black deputy is the killer? Has the killer EVER been a black guy? Is Tom the worst fucking actor I've ever seen? Will we get to see tits in 3D?

Awesome Review-O-Matic

Let's take a look at the only three (3D!) things to know about this movie:

1.) T&A (aka Nud-ipedia)

First off, in a slasher movie like this, no amount of T&A is 'gratuitious'. Quite to the contrary, it is in fact essential to the movie's success. Here, we get a mildly attractive blonde who is buck naked her entire time on screen (top and bottom!), which is quite funny when you think of it. Alas, she is the only 3 dimensional breasts we get to see.

The problem I had here was, if you were going to promise the audience 3D tits, you really want them to be a spectacular pair. Instead, we get a B cup. You would think they could find something better bouncing around Hollywood. Besides that, nobody else got naked.

The douchebag sheriff's mistress, Megan, is pretty hot but she is unfortunately clothed throughout. The survivor girl, Jaime King (who is famous though I'm not sure why), is 30 years old, and she looks it. And as we all know by now, the survivor girl is never hot, and she never gets naked. Though I get the feeling she probably could've played the hot slut girl 5-10 years ago.

Thankfully, there are no scenes of man ass in this, which has become a disturbing trend in recent films. What I don't understand is, why it's always gotta be a survivor girl?

Why no survivor dude?

If a slasher stalked another dude, would that make him gay? Are there gay slasher films? Some kinda psycho-social symbolism I'm missing here.

2) Gore (aka Goreipedia)

This flick delivers some decent kills. The psycho miner guy uses his ax/pick thing to fuck up the towns folk pretty good. A little variety in killing tools would've been nice, but I suspect they were trying to franchise this series and the weapon had to be really branded (a sequel is shamelessly hinted at).

There's a bunch of evisceration as you'd expect, a loose eyeball, and your standard decapitations. My favorite death was some guy getting his face ripped off by the jaw. Kudos to the bucket of blood thrown against a wall (so 1980s!). Good balance of quantity and quality in kills, although nothing truly special, considering how high the gore bar's been raised these days.

What's pretty silly is the killer in this movie, appears to be around 6 foot 8, and 260 pounds. He runs about about 4.3 40 yard dash (all off camera, mind you) and is strong enough to cut through solid bone with ease. He's like the Lebron James of slashers.

The movie never really explains why psycho dude always wears a gas mask. Does he have emphysema? Is he horribly disfigured? Mutant?

And, does he live in the mine when he's not killing? What does he eat? He must eat the victims afterward, right? There can't be any food source inside the mine, ....

3) 3D

This is why I wanted to see this. In every other way, this movie is another dime-a-dozen crap horror film. But the 3D really suckered everybody in (me included).

At first, it feels real trippy seeing the 3 dimensions. But it starts to feel really gimmicky quick. For instance, some dude is walking in the foreground and there's shit in the background, and they appear on different planes of your vision. Pretty cool but kinda pointless. You just wait for the kills and see how they utilize the trick.

Also, after a while I got used to the 3D and it loses it's novelty. They had to slow down the action for you to notice the 3D effect too.

By the end, it started giving me a headache. And it's not like the 3D is that amazing. I was kinda expecting the stuff to literally fly out of the screen like in the commercial. I had read that the 3D gore would 'kick my ass', and the 3D nudity was so good, I could "cop a feel". Shit would change my life.

Not quite.

Nope, more like the 3D stuff sorta hovered a foot over the screen, nothing more.

My life remains unchanged.

WTF moment

Some dude in the theatre actually ducked when psycho miner threw his axe. I was like "cmon dude, you gotta be kidding." Guy was very likely on drugs though.

Insano Steve's Final Prognosis

In the end, it just don't add up to much. Some people actually clapped at the end of the movie!

Really? Clapping? For "My Bloody Valentine 3D?" Like they just saw "Shawshank Redemption" or something.

Maybe my expectations were too high for shit like this. It did have some fun moments. But what can I say, I've seen movies suck in 2D. I've seen movies suck in HD. Now I've seen them suck in 3D. And the shit was $14.25. If only "Notorious" was filmed in 3D, hmmm, .....

Rating:
(2 spinkicks that look like 3 spinkicks from a distance)

The Trailer




Tags:
My Bloody Valentine 3D, My Bloody Valentine 3D review , 3d horror movies , jaime king, , jaime king naked, , 3D, , horror remake, my bloody valentine,

Categories: 3d, 3d horror movies, jaime king, jaime king naked, my bloody valentine 3D, my bloody valentine 3D review, my bloody valentine 3D trailer

3D Eyeballs are FRAKIN cool

Do you remember the scene above? It was in Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D. Jason squeezes some poor schmuck's head and his eyeball goes flying out in 3D gooeyness.

C'mon, you know it. It's the fuckin most memorable scene in Part 3. Besides the harpoon, the flaming iron, the yo yo and the stick.

I believe Part 3 is one of the best of the series. He gets his mask, the kills are all set up to be in gratuitous 3D and we get the "last scare" ending. Good times.

So as a horror automaton, I too will have to venture and watch My Bloody Valentine: 3D.

I keep hearing that the movie sucks but its "fun". Whatever that means.

So I'll let you know how it goes as the hype has hit me likes a bad case of SARS.

A possible review to come (if I feel like it)

I love the vintage 3D trailer with all the 3D kill scenes all blended in. This trailer is eerily similar to the remake one. Weird.

Categories: 3d, 3d horror movies, 3d scenes in friday the 13th part 3, friday the 13th, friday the 13th part 3, friday the 13th remake, jason voohees, my bloody valentine 3D