After Dark Films Presents BORDERLAND

The After Dark Horror Fest (in association with After Dark Films) has released some questionable films over the last few years after striking it big with it’s first Horror Fest two years ago. Last year they released this film BORDERLAND (2007), which is loosely based on a true story (and I do mean loosely).

The film concerns three Americans (Brian Presley, Rider Strong, and Jake Muxworthy) who venture off to Mexico on a last minute whim in order to party and have a good time. All they want to do is drink, take drugs, and have a good time but when one of them is kidnapped by a cult to sacrifice to a Satanic deity all hell starts to break loose. I could go into more detail but then there’s not much more to go into as the film is very predictable and not all that much fun nor entertaining. If the film had tried to be less a cliché I’m sure it would have come off as more entertaining or at least had a style or cinematic flare to carry it through I would be more forgiving (also take into account that I screened four of the After Dark Horror Fest Films in one night and only one of them was entertaining).

This film reminds me a lot of last year’s TOURISTAS but that film at least was entertaining and had some beautiful cinematography. BORDERLAND, which was produced on a small budget, had capable actors and the performances were all serviceable to the script (written by Eric Poppen and Zev Berman) but the story does nothing to try and be anything more than the sum of its parts. There are several standout and gory sequences in the film but not enough to interest die hard horror fans nor is there enough to the story interest the audiences looking for a thought provoking psychological thriller.

Director Zev Berman tries to hold the film together (and point of fact it does look better then most of the indie horror films I’ve seen of late) but he’s no Tobe Hooper and this is no TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.

This being said, this is a vast improvement over the Horror Fest’s first year since the majority of those films were just bad all around and BORDERLAND isn’t bad, it just isn’t all that good either but in hindsight it is a testament to the mandate of After Dark Films which is to bring to audiences a variety of horror films that otherwise would go unnoticed. And I noticed this one so I guess they’re doing a good job in that respect.

After Dark Films Presents TOOTH & NAIL

As part of the 2007 After Dark Horror Fest I can forgive the pitfalls of this post-apocalyptic tail TOOTH & NAIL for all its short comings. Written & directed by Mark Young (and almost exclusively in one location) TOOTH & NAIL tells the story of a world in which the absence of oil and gasoline has caused the world to become plunged into total chaos. In the film, a idealistic man Darwin (played by an exceptionally well casted Robert Carradine) has banded together a group of survivors who have refused to move south like the rest of the population but have instead taken a large hospital as there new paradise from which to rebuild society for a new age.

There world is torn apart when they decide to rescue a woman from being abducted but cannibal survivors and who subsequently follow them back to their paradise. From then one, each night the survivors within the hospital are preyed upon by the cannibals who only kill one of them each night in order to prolong their food supply. As the number of survivors in the hospital dwindle each night they must decide what to do in order to survive or escape the cannibals into the unknown outside world.

TOOTH & NAIL is an interesting concept that doesn’t go the distance when it comes to the execution. This is mainly because they have Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones as two of the main cannibals who do absolutely nothing for the film. The film could’ve worked better without the “star” names attached and if it had stayed closed with the characters within the hospital and made it a tense and disturbing psychological horror film similar to that of HIGH TENSION or THE HILLS HAVE EYES (either version), in which we know little about the killers but instead stay with the characters plight.

As directed by Young, the film has no cinematic flare or style which is needed in a film that takes place all within one location. It’s a lamentable attempt at best but it suffers because of its predictability and pedestrian treatment of the script. Carradine does a great job in his limited role but so does supporting actors Nicole DuPort, Rider Strong (much better here then in his other After Dark Film BORDERLAND), and Rachel Miner, while all the other characters are simply throw away characters in which you don’t really care when they die.

Although the death scenes are plentiful (mostly towards the end) they are practically goreless and sub-par for most horror fans of these types of films. TOOTH & NAIL is just a simple film that chooses not to go the distance, which is a shame because it could have been so much better.