Top Ten DTV Horrors of 2009

It’s that time of year when everyone compiles their Top Ten’s of the year, and Blogomatic3000 is no different. If you follow me on Twitter you may have read that I said I was going to compile a list of the Top Ten straight to DVD releases of 2009. That was the original plan… But when I started working on my list I realised that 2009 was a REALLY good year for straight to DVD movies, horror movies in particular – so I decided to split the horror genre off into its own separate list, which is presented in its entirety below for your delectation.

Now this list is completely subjective, and you may not agree with any or all of my choices or the order in which they appear. Either way I’d love to read your thoughts on my choices good or bad, so don’t forget to leave a comment. Anyway, onto the list:

10) Deadgirl
Deadgirl tells the story of two greasy losers, Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez), and J.T (Noah Segan), who cut school, break into an abandoned mental asylum, and find a beautiful, but comatose, girl (Jenny Spain), strapped to a gurney. Almost immediately, Noah decides to keep the girl, rather than free her or tell the police. While this might stretch believability for any sane viewer, it’s apparent that Noah is damaged, and sees this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to live out his violent, alpha-male, sexual fantasies. Before long, Noah starts dabbling in undead S&M, and discovers that no matter how far he pushes the rough stuff, his zombie sex slave can take it. Deadgirl is a hybrid of teen black comedies ala Heathers, the so-called “torture porn” of Hostel and Saw and sleazy 70s erotica; and, in an age where audiences seem ever-impervious to on screen horror, Deadgirl manages a rare feat – to genuinely shock its audience.

9) Boogeyman 3
College student Audrey Allen (Corrie’s Nikki Sanderson) is haunted by the Boogeyman following her fathers death (in Boogeyman 2), and tries to convince her best friend Sarah (Erin Cahill), a psychology student, that the Boogeyman is real. Sarah doesn’t believe her until she witnesses Audrey’s death one night at the hands of the monster. Whilst everyone is convinced that Audrey committed suicide, only Sarah knows the truth – theBoogeyman is real and he’s haunting the dorms of Hammond Hall. Following my disappointment in the first Boogeyman film and having skipped Boogeyman 2, I wasn’t holding out much hope for the third in the series. I could not have been more suprised. Boogeyman 3 delivers on the horror front, with some brilliantly inventive deaths and an an air of suspense throughout. The film is only let down by some risible acting from the “unknowns” in the cast. Gary Jones, director of the amazing b-movie Spiders, really knows how to deliver: there’s gore and shocks a-plenty in this DTV gem.

8) 100 Feet
Marnie Watson is granted early release from her prison sentence for manslaughter (killing her husband – a violent NYC cop – in self defense) on condition she wear an electronic ankle bracelet and remain within her home, effectively under house arrest, for the remainder of her sentence. Her late husband’s partner keeps tabs on her from a patrol car parked across the street, hoping she’ll violate probation and he can send her back to prison. But the 100-foot radius her ankle bracelet allows isn’t the worst of her problems. Her dead husband -now a malevolent ghost-is still in the house, where he died, intent on savage revenge.Famke Janssen wows is what is almost a one character movie from writer/director Eric Red, who was previously responsible for the horror classics The Hitcher and Near Dark, here he mixes a typical battered woman story with a spooky ghost angle that manages to entertain right to the bloody denoument; and its a credit to both Red as writer/director and Janssen that the film holds your attention from the get go and never lets up.

7) Cradle Will Fall (aka Baby Blues)
This film, the debut feature from the team of Lars Jacobson and Amardeep Keleka, is based (very loosely) on the true story of Andrea Yates – a Texan mother who drowned her five children in the bath in 2001 and is a story of post partum depression taken to the horrific slasher movie extreme. The film is most definitely not for the motherly types out there. With her truck driving husband constantly out on the road, a young mother (Colleen Porch) struggles to raise her three young children alone on a secluded farmhouse. Already suffering frompost partum depression, the pressure of caring for her three children causes her to undergo a psychotic break and triggers a filicidal rampage. The only person capable of stopping her murderous attack is her eldest child, 10 year old Jimmy, who must protect his little sister and newborn brother whilst fending off the one person a child instinctively looks to for protection. Their mother… Cradle Will Fall is one of those films that throws the viewer in at the deep end right from the start, there’s no time spent on character development and narrative build up instead the film spends it time building a real air of menace before eventually cranking up the tension by killing off one of the children thus proving to the audience that all bets are off and no one in the movie is safe. Whilst the film is a slasher movie at heart, it’s one step above other films of its ilk and is a suitably creepy entry into the genre.

6) Necromentia
Hagen (Santiago Craig) keeps his recently deceased girlfriend Elizabeth in the basement, waiting for the day she will return to him from beyond the grave. When Travis (Chad Grimes) approaches him and offers him the one chance to revive his loved one, Hagen doesn’t think twice about accepting his offer. Little does he know that Travis has ulterior motives and that in order to reach Elizabeth, Hagen must undergo a ritual that includes the carving of an occultouija board on his body and a journey into the very depths of hell to rescue Travis’ brother in exchange for the key to bringing Elizabeth back. With Necromentia, Pearry Teo has crafted a film that manages to out do even Hellraiser. Featuring some of the most unique (and twisted) imagery I’ve ever seen committed to celluloid, combined in an almost puzzle-like film that warrants multiple viewings, Necromentia definitely marks Teo as a director to watch.

5) Staunton Hill
The second film from director Cameron Romero, son of legendary director George Romero. Following his father’s footsteps, Romero crafts a visceral, gory shocker that recalls the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead. Set in the late 60’s, the film follows five friends as they hitchhike their way across the US to attend a political rally in Washington DC. Abandoned at a gas station, the group – Cole (DavidRountree), Jordan (Cristen Coppen), Boone (Kiko Ellsworth), Raina (Christine Carlo) and Trish (Paula Rhodes) – manage to get a ride from a benevolent stranger with a temperamental pick-up truck that breaks down in the middle of nowhere. With night closing in and a storm on the way, the group take refuge in a barn at a seemingly deserted farm.When the group awake the next morning they find the farm’s owners: GrandmaStaunton, Louise Staunton and her mentally challenged son Buddy. Following an altercation between Buddy and Cole, the Stauntons apologise and invite their guests to stay for breakfast. But behind the friendly facade of this eccentric family lies a terrible secret, a secret that will be revealed to the group in the most unpleasant of ways… With Staunton Hill, director Cameron Romero has crafted a true successor to Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, matching the best of his father’s work, perhaps even surpassing it.

4) Babysitter Wanted
Virginal Angie Albright (Sarah Thompson) leaves her strict Catholic home bound for college, once there she is haunted by feelings of being watched by a mysterious man. Settling into college life with new roommate and new boyfriend, Angie decides to earn money by babysitting. She gets a job babysitting for a local couple, theStantons . On her first night on the job she is spooked by strange phone calls, the kid, Sam, she’s watching goes missing, then the stranger Angie suspects is watching her breaks into the house and tries to kill Sam. But that’s just the beginning… Babysitter Wanted starts out life as a cross between Halloween and When a Stranger Calls – a young girl afraid for her safety, an apparent stalker following her on the college campus. All the stereotypes of your typical Halloween-esque modern day horror movie. But note, I did say ’starts out’, because just when you think you know where the film is going it throws in a huge plot twist changing the course of the film completely. For seasoned horror fans like myself, that twist may have been slightly obvious, but watch the film with someone who isn’t a big horror movie aficionado and see them look totally confused when it happens. With a nostalgic feel, and some superb acting from Sarah Thompson as “final girl” Angie and Bruce Thomas as Mr. Stanton, Babysitter Wanted is a worthy entry on the top ten of 2009.

3) Infestation
When lifelong slacker Cooper Flynn (Christopher Marquette) is fired from his job he thinks his day couldn’t get any worse, how wrong could one man be? Awakening to find himself wrapped in a strange webbed cocoon Cooper manages to free himself but then faces a life-or-death struggle with a enormous beetle-like creature. After defeating the monster and freeing some of his co-workers from their cocoons, Cooper and a small band of survivors set out into the giant bug-infested city in order to find sanctuary in a bomb shelter at the home of Cooper’s ex-military father, played by Ray Wise. Infestation is a FUN movie – blending the goofy and the gross to perfection, in much the same way as Eight Legged Freaks did – however Infestation does it much better thanks to top-notch acting and directing. Director Kyle Rankin manages to successfully create the same vibe as Shaun of the Dead but in a monster movie setting and like Simon Pegg in that film, Marquette makes for an endearing ‘no-action hero’, his character embodies the same slacker ethos – only springing into action when necessary, before finally making the leap into true action hero status when “the girl” needs savingala Pegg in Shaun. The “killer insect” movie is a long standing tradition in the horror genre, from it’s heyday in the 70’s with the likes of The Swarm and Kingdom of the Spiders, to the more recent giant spiders on the rampage in Eight Legged Freaks, but Infestation may just be the best yet…

2) Trick ‘r Treat
After Midnight, Creepshow, Twilight Zone: The Movie… The horror anthology took it’s last dying cinematic breath in the 1980’s and whilst the tradition lived on for a little longer ontelevision thanks to the success of Tales From The Crypt, the genre had all but died in cinema. But now the rotting corpse of the horror anthology has been brought back to re-animated life with Michael Dougherty’s Halloween offering, Trick ‘r Treat. The film interweaves four tales of terror featuring all the classic creepies – vampires, werewolves, and monsters, including those of the human kind. Tying the stories together is Sam (Quinn Lord) our diminutive burlap sack-headed guide to the macabre who appears briefly in each story. It’s credit to Michael Dougherty’s writing skills that the stories in Trick ‘r Treat seems both fresh yet comfortably familiar and it’s staggering to see such a well-rounded and uniformly excellent cast in a DTV horror film.

1) The Hills Run Red
Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink), is a film fanatic whose obsession with finding a complete print of an infamous slasher movie entitled The Hills Run Red leads him and two friends into the backwoods where the film was shot. Interwoven in the movie, the film-within-a-film, The Hills Run Red, is a particularly nasty piece of celluloid starring a demented killer called Babyface. The story goes that it was so extreme that it was pulled after a few screenings, and neither it nor it’s director, Wilson Wyler Concannon, were ever seen or heard from again. Tyler vows to track down the film whatever the cost, but little do they realize that filming of The Hills Run Red never ended and now they must survive the nightmarish onslaught of Babyface or risk becoming part of the movie forever. The Hills Run Red is a roller coaster ride of a movie for horror fans everywhere, albeit a ride with a very nasty streak running through it’s short 81 minutes running time mind you. Director Dave Parker has really pushed the envelope in all aspects, and unlike many slasher movies has toned down the comedy which together make for a refreshing change – it’s good to see something potentially as sleazy as the videonasties of the early 80’s in today’s all too PC society.

So what do you think? Agree or disagree? What were your favourites of 2009? Let me know in the comments!