Monster Scholar

Every woman knows the magic of a perfect pair of shoes. Slip them on and you transform from the average housewife or soccer mom into a slinky sex goddess, powerful and confident in your six inch stilettos. A woman will do anything for a premier pair of pumps. Cinderella’s stepsisters were willing to hack off heel and toe to make those glass slippers fit and Dorothy went head to head with the Wicked Witch of the West for her sparkly ruby footwear. The unbreakable bond between a woman and her shoes is at the heart of the Korean horror film, The Red Shoes. Viewers might be confused by the title of the film because the cursed shoes that appear in the film are actually pink. This color change (as far as I can remember) was the result of a copyright dispute involving another pair of prominent red slippers in cinema. Ahem. A woman named Sun-jae finds herself on the business end of horrible curse when she picks up a pair of seemingly abandoned shoes on the subway. But these shoes aren’t y...

"Love hurts, Love scars, Love wounds and mars"--Nazareth At the behest of several horror bloggers I finally got up the gumption to watch French horror import, High Tension. That’s not to say I had never heard of it before, I had, but the trailers left me thinking it was more of the same slasher fare I’d been sick of for years. That is until I read about the twist ending and decided to see for myself what the fuss was all about. On an aesthetic level, High Tension warrants the high praise it’s been given at home and abroad. The film is beautifully shot, creepily atmospheric and gave me the first genuine thrill I’ve had in months. The movie starts out with Marie and Alexia, classmates traveling to the secluded country home of Marie’s parents for a quiet weekend of studying for college exams. But their plans are interrupted by a psychotic truck driver, who invades Marie’s home and kick starts a night of endless terror. (If you don’t know the twist, turn back now! Spoilers ...

Set to hit select theaters in the US July 31st, the latest film from director Chan-wook Park centers around a frustrated priest played Kang-ho Song, who you might recognize as the bumbling older brother of the little girl abducted by sea monsters in the Korean horror movie The Host . But Song has come a long way from playing the comic relief, and here he takes on a much more serious and brooding role as a man of the cloth who is disillusioned with God because of the suffering people have to go through in this life to get to the next. In this frame of mind, he volunteers himself to be a guinea pig for a vaccine to cure the deadly F.I.V. virus. But instead of curing the disease he contracts it and it leaves him with a hunger for human blood. The trailer (especially the last part) left me with the same creeped out feeling I got from watching Takeshi Miike's Audition . There is a similair tension and a disgusted treatment of sex that I sense from both films that is sure to put some on...