Slashers and Sequels

Slashers ~ Presented by Fangoria, Slashers is the ultimate Japanese game show crossed with The Running Man and a bucketful of gore. Really, what more do you need? There are enough beautiful Asian girls in short skirts any anime fan happy and enough blood and gore to thrill any torture porn Saw/Hostel fan. If you can take it, Slashers is an entertaining look at reality television and humanity in general, but it’s also an exercise in extreme bad taste that needs to be watched with a sense of humor – a sick one. That said, I liked it, a lot. And of course it’s got the catchiest theme song of any flick in a long long time. You’ll be singing it for days afterwards.



The Lost Boys: The Tribe ~ What a disappointment. If you’re going to make a remake using the same plot as the original with different characters, don’t call it a sequel. Especially when it’s a movie that people have been begging and waiting for a sequel to for decades. This makes me wonder whatever happened to the Lost Girls script that floated around Hollywood for so long. There are no surprises here, nothing you haven’t seen before, and seen better – especially the Two Coreys. Give this one a miss.



WarGames: The Dead Code ~ There was considerable, if a bit under the radar, promotion for this one – most notably a preview that premiered alongside the 25th anniversary showing of the original WarGames in selected theatres this summer. Wired magazine even had a write-up that interviewed many celebrities, of the political, technical and Hollywood type, regarding how the original affected the world when it first came out. After watching the new one, I doubt they’ll be doing the same thing with it in twenty-five years, or ever.



While it tries very hard to be cutting edge and in the moment, it is also very much the same formula as the original movie. And so, while it’s well done, if a bit predictable, I have the same problem here as with Lost Boys, is it really a sequel if it’s the same plot with different characters? Like I said, it’s well done, possibly worth watching on free cable, but don’t pay for it.