The horror... the horror

Having just watched the low-budget horror cheapie It Waits, I have to say I'm getting sick of the lack of shitty direct-to-video horror movies lately.

Not that there's a drought, exactly - movies like Spirit Trap and Kaw still keep the shite level from bottoming out - but the majority of bad horror movies that we've seen in the last few weeks haven't been all that bad. They're not good, by any means, but they don't suck... and that's really starting to bother me.

Let me be clear - It Waits was nothing to rave about: Cerina Vincent stars as a park ranger who goes up against a creature from Native American mythology (and which looks a lot like the spawn of Pumpkinhead and the Creeper), while dealing with her own personal demons in the process. Nothing particularly new or shocking here, but It Waits was actually better than it had any right being. A few creepy moments, some good scares, a nice fake-looking severed head, and a little something called Character Development (possibly laid on with a trowel) helped this one rise above.

Plane Dead is another one that sticks out. Think Snakes on a Plane with zombies instead of snakes. Obviously it wasn't great - it was never going to be - but neither did it fall into the fabled So Bad It's Good territory. The zombie make-up was standard, if not sub-standard (and I could have done without the yellow Salem's-Lot contact lenses, thank you very much), the plot was whisper thin (I did mention Snakes on a Plane, right?) and their "star power" consisted of Raymond J. Barry and Dale Midkiff. Also, that creepy guy from The Mummy remake was in it, so there's no reason on God's earth that this should have been as entertaining as it was. Yet we couldn't look away, and were never bored by it.

Same with Altered, the second offering from The Blair Witch Project's Eduardo Sanchez. Basically, it's what might have happened if Travis Walton's buddies from Fire in the Sky had grown some rather than fleeing like little girls from the scene of his alien abduction. The IMDb synopsis reads thus: "Fifteen years ago, five men were abducted by aliens. Only four returned. Now, these same four men have managed to capture one of the creatures who killed their friend and ruined their lives. It's time for payback..." X-tro meets Deliverance might sum it up better. And apart from one cheesey CGI effect - which only came in the last five minutes - this movie rocked! And Sanchez managed to pull it together with only one set and $8 million.

I'm not so much lamenting the passing of bad horror - hell, we have Eli Roth and Leigh Whannel to see that we're up to our fucking bile ducts in Hostel and Saw movies for the next fifteen or twenty years - as I am wondering when these low-budget, direct to video flicks (the modern day equivalent to the drive-in splatter-fests of the 70s) started to give the big-budget Hollywood shite a run for its money.