News  |   News Archive  |   Horror Movie Reviews  |   Asian Cinema  |   Interviews  |   Latest Headlines  |   Contact  |   Links
 Asian Macabre  |   Horror Hottys  |  


Codex Atanicus
Codex Atanicus is a three story anthology by Spanish director Carlos Atanes. Before watching the movie I never heard of the guy, but the introduction video on the DVD by one of his regular actresses Arantxa Peņa made me realize that I'm in for a hell of a ride. Experimental, bizarre, sick, strange - these are some of the words that describe the stories contained in Codex Atanicus. The anthology is opened by a 20 minute short from 1995 called Metaminds & Metabodies. I am really not into this kind of experimental videos, but I will try to summarize. It opens with a girl singing in the club. Everything looks ultra underground and the girl is connected with some wires to the walls. Strange people are watching her...
Read full review...

Movie Review: Berserker

Story
The other day I was reading a book I recently ordered via Lulu, a web shop that offers everyone the possibility to publish their own writing. Author Tim Gross released two issues of Gross Movie Reviews, books covering horror genre with a special focus on a bit obscure movies. One of the movies listed was "Berserker", a slasher starring a murderous viking that I already had in my collection. I never watched it so I decided to change that.

Comments
The movie sports a classic slasher story of that time - a bunch of teenagers go camping to enjoy their sexuality, drink some booze and smoke some weed. Everything would be just fine, but they chose a camping site that over ten centuries ago was used by vikings to imprison their most homicidal members. Called Berserkers, these violent vikings were famous for eating humans and according to the legend their spirits can possess their descendants.

The teenagers are welcomed to the camp by Pappy, a bearded Norwegian with a very fake accent. He gives them directions to the camp site, but in the middle of the night Pappy becomes worried for the teens and calls the local sheriff to help him find them. The sheriff is his close relative, so now we have two potential descendants of the maniacal Berserker viking. At the same time, the teens start playing around the woods and soon become targets of a violent murders.

Berserker Berserker

The special thing about "Berserker" is something that slasher fanatics such as myself would never expect of this kind of a movie. The thing is, that until the finishing 20 minutes of the movie you don't know if you are watching a typical slasher or an animal attack movie. Yes, I know that this sounds weird, but the murders look like they were committed by a bear, all the closeups in the "action" scenes contain bear paws and teeth and as a summary of every killing you have a nice zoom on a roaring bear. This was all planned to confuse us rare weirdos who actually watched the movie, but I can say that the movie really contains a killing Berserker. Rock on!

Any sane being would say that this movie is a complete waste of time, but I must mention a couple of good points - while the script was lousy, the characters weren't so bad at all. Besides this, every time that the Berserker appears, especially in the opening and ending scenes, he looks really creepy and generates a rather eerie howl.

I need to mention one specific scene that totally reminded me of the legendary Fulci's zombie vs shark action sequence. Here we have a "They Live" type of a lengthy scene where Berserker fights a huge bear. There some good ass kicking in that scene.

Final Comments
"Berserker" should be recommended *only* to real slasher fans. With this I am not thinking about the people who started their slasher fascination with Craven's "Scream", but those who are fascinated when they come across a new "gem" from the 80s.

By

Back to Horror Review Archive

Berserker

ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Berserker: The Nordic Curse
MOVIE YEAR: 1987
DIRECTOR: Jefferson Richard
WRITING CREDITS: Joseph Kaufman
GENRE: Horror, Slasher
CAST: Joseph Alan Johnson, Valerie Sheldon, Mike Riley
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 85 min

RATING: 3/10

Berserker Website/IMDB Click here
Berserker Trailer Click here

© Evil Dread 2008  |  https://evildread.com  |  Scaring folks since 2005