For quite some time now, the horror genre has simply been seen as an easy jolt; a way to get your date to jump into your arms for consolation that will later pay-off at a run for second base. Furthermore, it's a reason to plug in formula more than any other genre, a fact exploited in Wes Craven's Scream films. The disease is rampant in the U.S., with few exceptions in the rest of the world. Social commentary in horror films (Land of the Dead, The Devil's Rejects) just doesn't sell as much as wimpy, by-the-numbers stuff (Saw II, House of Wax) these days.

Tamara raises the stakes: it throws in even more teen hormones than House of Wax. Tell me if this sounds familiar: an ugly duckling named Tamara (Jenna Dewan) is accidentally killed while being bullied about uncovering steroid usage at school. But death, of course, never keeps a good girl down. She returns as a cleavage-sprouting hottie with an axe to grind against the kids who put her in the ground, using her new-found power to make people do what she wants. She also makes time to try to get close to Mr. Notally (Matthew Marsden), the dreamy teacher who ignored her before her death. Don't get me started about how Tamara drives her dispatchers to self-mutilation and homosexual tendencies. Oh, and her father is a booze hound, in case you didn't know.

Continue reading: Tamara Review

Final Destination Review

By James Brundage

"I'm never going to die!" yells one character at a memorial for 39 fellow French-class students who died in a plane crash that, by all rights, he should have died on too. As incredibly laughable as this line is, it provides the big flaw in the basic premise behind Final Destination... making a horror movie about people cheating death does not have much potential. Since you can't kill Death, destroy Death, or send Death screaming back to its home planet, you have a no-win scenario in front of you. No matter what is said or done, everyone ends up getting it.

This is not to give you a spoiler and to say that everyone gets it in the movie. This is simply to point out the fact that no matter which way they go, they're screwed. Death is a no-win scenario. If you're going to make a movie about escaping death, make it a la Fearless, where we focus on the human element. But since it's a horror film the ball is in the court of Director James Wong to provide us with something that will keep us interested for an hour and forty minutes of inevitability.

Continue reading: Final Destination Review