Quick looks at modern horror time killers 14

I’ll make these quick. Real quick….

HAZMAT (2013)

Basically, an episode of Scare Tactics goes horribly wrong in Hazmat. A group of people is in on the prank in an old chemical plant, the small crew is in a safe room somewhere in the building watching all the action on monitors, and someone finds a hazmat suit and pick axe.

The kills are pretty gory good and there are a couple of fun suspense scenes. Heck, even the premise is cool. But the film drags, the tone and performances are cheesy, and once a group of five people is trapped in the safe room, you can’t help but wonder why they don’t just each grab something to use as a weapon, unlock the door, and pulverize the one lone guy with the pickaxe instead of trying independently to leave the room one by one….

THE TASK (2011)

More reality show horror when contestants are set loose in an abandoned prison to perform certain terrifying tasks. The Task is pretty much exactly like an episode of that MTV show Fear from the early 2000s. And this one has a pretty dang good horror cast:

Texas Battle (Boggy Creek, Wrong Turn 2, Final Destination 3)

Adam Rayner (Steel Trap)

Antonia Campbell-Hughes (Storage 24)

Ashley Mulheron (Vampire Killers)

Marc Pickering (Sleepy Hollow)

Sam Stockman (Hollow)

We even get the interview introductions of each contestant, including one “Totally off the hook” gay. Not that he needed to tell us. It’s way clear. And we’ve never seen a non-totally-off-the-hook reality show gay….

Never would’ve guessed….

There’s a whole lot of footage of them doing their scary tasks, but eventually we get to see the big threat…a bald, burly inmate. Sexy. But is he real or a ghost? He even appears and disappears on camera as the show’s crew watches, so they begin to suspect the network is fucking with even them.

It has its creepy moments and things get a little more involved than the scary sexy inmate killer, but The Task probably won’t stick with you.

AXE GIANT: THE WRATH OF PAUL BUNYAN (2013)

Blow Victor Crowley of Hatchet up into a 3-story giant inbreed.

Give him plenty of victims to kill in awful CGI (including a bear). And throw in Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty.

Plus Joe Estevez, the lovechild of Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen (actually, he’s Martin’s brother).

Then completely butcher the legend of Paul Bunyan and you have this ridiculous mess I’d highly advise you to catch on SyFy on a boring Sunday afternoon.

She never knew what split her.

My favorite part is when Bunyan huffs, puffs, and axes a house down. There’s also a hot kid who takes off his shirt and adorable Thomas Downey from Sorority Party Massacre, which I blog about here.

DEVIL’S DUE (2014)

The level of “been there, done that” is way out of hand with some of these mainstream Hollywood found footage films these days. And while I blog about crap in large part for my own entertainment, I would bore the frick out of even myself if I tried to force one out for possessed pregnancy-wife acting weird-endless roaming around house found footage film Devil’s Due.

Now that was fun to write.