Silent Predators (1999)

A small town deals with an invasion of rattlesnakes. 

In 1979, a delivery truck makes its way up a lonely southern California highway in a storm, bound for the San Diego Zoo with a deadly tropical rattlesnake as cargo. When the truck suffers a blowout, the driver loses control and hits a tree, shattering the snake's aquarium in the back and the window separating the snake from the driver. The snake slithers into the front of the truck, kills the driver with its bite and then moves off into the forest. Flash forward to 1999. The small southern California town of San Vicente has grown from 6,000 to 30,000, and the rattler, which escaped nearby years ago, has bred. There are now 25,000 of these hybrid rattlesnakes, and they are slowly making their way downhill into the town, attracted by the movement of the blasting as the town paves its way toward progress. Progress, in this case, brings terror, in this tale originally penned by John Carpenter.  

This film uses every single cliche from countless other horror movies which have "nature vs. the greedy interests of capitalism" as a them.  Not bad for a tele-movie, with capable performances and well conceived sub plots.  It's not the worst film ever but everything here has been done to death.  Even in this film everything is done over.  All the kills and deaths are repetitive.  Snake bites a dummy and dummy dies.

The hunt is on. You're the Prey.

It was directed by Noel Nosseck.  Director Nosseck doesn't do anything special with the film, it has no real style or flair to it although it does look a little better than it's low budget made-for-TV origins would suggest.  The script by John Carpenter (if you can believe that), William S. Gilmore & Matt Dorff is as clichéd, predictable & strictly by-the-numbers as is possible.

Let me suck that poison out baby.

For silent predators these snakes sure make a lot of noise.  Oh yeah, they're fucking rattlesnakes...the nosiest snakes ever. If you can catch this movie on TV and have time to kill you can give it a watch.  Otherwise there is no need to go out of your way to find it.

Trivia:

This was based on "Fangs", a script John Carpenter did back in the 1970s when he wrote as a gun for hire. In the original, according to Carpenter himself, there were scares and jumps all over the place. One scene included a man who hears a rattle, thinks it's his infant, and finds a rattlesnake in the crib.

Let's drive off set and never come back.

Deep Rising (1998)

A group of heavily armed hijackers board a luxury ocean liner in the South Pacific Ocean to loot it, only to do battle with a series of large-sized, tentacled, man-eating sea creatures who have taken over the ship first. 

Deep Rising is a 1998 American action horror film directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Treat Williams, Famke Janssen and Anthony Heald.  It's silly, cliché-heavy, and utterly predictable.  I would consider this to be what I call a "popcorn movie".  It's mindless entertainment.  This movie is stupid as hell, but it knows it, and just wants to take us along on its stupid ride.

The movie has mercenaries that are on their way to a Titanic-like cruise ship called the Argonautica in order to steal and blow it up.  The thing they weren't counting on was a monster with snake tentacles that sucks humans dry.  It's basically a rip off of Alien where a monster traps everyone in a sealed off location and takes them out one by one.

This ain't no pleasure cruise

The monster is pretty well designed and cool looking and some of the deaths are pretty brutal.  Beyond that, the film fails on most other levels.  The comic relief is provided by the ship's engineer, who whines his way through the movie and spits out lame joke after lame joke.  In fact they all crack shitty one liners no matter how bad the situation.  There is practically no tension here because at no time can this film be taken seriously - whatsoever.

Women and children first. You're next.

 If you know the work of Sommers, then you will know what to expect from his movies, aside from the fact that they lessen in quality every time a new one is released.  He also did Van Helsing which was a tremendous box office bomb as was this film.  Although to his credit he did very well with The Mummy.

Admittedly you must like B-movie fluff to enjoy this but then it has no pretensions other than escapism.  There isn't really much else to say about this film. No great science here. No factual based story....just have fun, eat popcorn.

Now what?

 Trivia:

Famke Janssen's character Trillian is named after the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy character of the same name. Although here Trillian is her actual name, in Hitch-Hiker's it's short for Tricia McMillan. 

Claire Forlani was cast as Trillian St. James. She even started shooting, but walked out after just three days, due to creative differences with director Stephen Sommers. The part subsequently went to Famke Janssen.

The "Chinese M1 L1 triple-pulse assault rifles" used by the pirates are actually heavily modified Calico M-960 submachine guns fitted with 100-round magazines (as opposed to the "thousand-round capacity" mentioned by Hanover). Five non-functional rotating barrels were built around the actual barrel of each Calico and driven by a small electric motor connected to the trigger, so that whenever the gun was fired, it appeared to be firing out of the rotating barrels.

Captain Atherton, played by Derrick O'Connor, was named after cinematographer Howard Atherton.

Harrison Ford turned down the role of Finnegan. The production's budget was then downsized. 

They Seized The World's Richest Ship... But No One's On Board!

Famke Janssen was almost not cast in this movie because the producers felt she was too recognizable from GoldenEye (1995)

In the original script, John Finnegan's catchphrase was "what now?" In the film it was changed to "now what?"

One of the few films that has no heroes or heroines. Finnegan and his crew are hired for villainous reasons. Trillian is a thief. The mercenaries are simply mercenaries.

Stephen Sommers began writing the script, then called "Tentacle", when he worked at Hollywood Pictures in the mid-90s. 

The January 1st, 1996 revised draft of the screenplay lists Robert Mark Kamen as a co-writer.

In the initial scene of the Argonautica Casino there can be seen some old Italian banknotes probably used to portrait an exotic foreign currency; their size is 2000 lire and 1000 lire. These were the smallest banknote sizes at the time, roughly equivalent to 1$ and 50c of 2013 - in 1998 the price of an Italian newspaper was 1200 lire.

Full scream ahead.

Cat In The Brain (1990)

Dr. Lucio Fulci is a director of splatterfilms. He stages a gestapo-orgy like it was any other movie scene. But he is influenced by these things more than he likes. He is hunted by bloody visions day by day. Is Fulci still normal? He asks a psychatrist. He doesn't know that the psychatrist has much bigger problems than Fulci himself. The psychatrist uses Fulci's visions for brutal murders in real life.

Are you ready for a cavalcade of craziness and chaos?  Just one insane scene after another?  This is the film for you then dear friend.  Lucio Fulci plays himself and after years of making horror movies, he thinks he's going insane.  Basically he starts seeing the craziest shit you can imagine. He goes and sees a shrink who hypnotizes him into thinking he's committing terrible murders when in fact it's the doctor that's getting off on butchering people.  That's the film.  It's as if Fulci decided that he was going to take every crazy death scene he had stored in his mind and somehow get them in a film.  He did....it's just one violent sequence after another and it's very entertaining.  Don't get me wrong....it's a mess.....but an entertaining mess. 

Fulci throws an insane amount of violence into this film and it surpasses any other film he's ever made.  Just some fun decapitation, child murder, cannibalism and some heads getting chainsawed off.  Oh did I mention the Nazi Orgy. But in reality, I think this was a personal statement film for Fulci and was an attack against censorship.

The acting in the film is awful.  Fulci is no actor himself but he's actually the best one in the film.  The budget is of course almost non existent but as usual Lucio works around that and creates his demented artistry.  Also after seeing the movie, I don't think it's a stretch to say that Wes Craven stole this idea of a "film within a film within a film" for "New Nightmare".   Granted, I think Craven's film is much better overall...but hey...Fulci deserves some credit for the idea at least.

The shrink needs a fucking shrink.

This is a Fulci film.  If you're a fan....you'll love it.  If you're not...you will think it's trash.  I like Fulci and I approve this message.  The film is way underrated by most horror fans.

Bitch, I said cook dinner.....

Trivia:

This film was refused a video classification in 1999 by the British Board of Film Classification, but was finally passed uncut with an '18' rating in mid-2003.

Many events in the film are based on Lucio Fulci's experiences as a filmmaker.

The original script was 49 pages long and contained no dialogue. It consisted of descriptions of bodily mutilations/imagery and sound effects that would compliment them on screen.

How about a little Nazi Orgy fun?