Parry Shen
Occupation
Actor
Hatchet Review
By Chris Cabin
Weak
Touted as the next big thing in horror by everyone from Kane Hodder to Dee Snider, Adam Green's Hatchet comes pre-packaged by the director himself as a return to "Old-School American Horror." What does he mean by "old-school?" The facts that the main dismemberer in Green's film is played by Hodder, the man behind Jason Vorhees, and that Freddy Kruger himself, Robert Englund, makes a cameo in the early minutes of the film give it some street cred in the crowded world of iconic horror (Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street).
Green's agenda is to return the horror genre to a lean mixture of gore and humor, as well as reestablishing the notion of horror iconography. His icon is Victor Crowley, a double-decker-sized mutant hillbilly relegated to the swamps of New Orleans. As you might suspect, Victor finds himself in the mood for a festive homicide when a boatload of tourists on a haunted swamp tour get stuck near his burnt-out family shack. Soon enough, Victor begins tossing limbs and torsos every which way while impaling and mutilating any body that has the good fortune of staying in one piece. It becomes the charge of a vengeful girl (Tamara Feldman) and a nerdy so-and-so (Joel Moore) to escape Crowley's clutches, heartbeats intact.
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The New Guy (2002) Review
Terrible
When the screenwriter responsible for one of the worst movies of one year directs an equally miserable film the following year, you'd have a hard time believing it was just coincidence. But Ed Decter, writer of the horribly unfunny Freddie Prinze Jr. clunker Head Over Heels, takes the directing reins for the first time with the remarkably lame teen comedy The New Guy.
The premise is simple: a high school ugly duckling named Dizzy (Road Trip's DJ Qualls) turns it around and starts fresh at a new school, strutting like a badass and making a new personality for himself as a guy named Gil. The supposedly funny twist is that he gets his education in cool while hanging at a prison, taking lessons in toughness from Eddie Griffin (wasted in his short appearance), learning how to dance like a hipster from Horatio Sanz (also wasted), and getting a makeover from the stereotypical cross-dressing cons in the pen. In each scene, Decter and screenwriter David Kendall (big blame goes to him too) want to get right to the funny immediately - the only problem is that each attempt results in a vacant black hole.
Continue reading: The New Guy (2002) Review