I was at a bit of a loss as to what film I would cover for a Lovecraft month. Keith helpfully reeled off a list of yet-to-be-claimed titles (I won’t call them the dregs, exactly), one of which, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, I had never heard of. I darted over to the IMDB and perused the user reviews for Sleep, of which subject lines like “Quite possibly the worst film I’ve ever seen”, “Avoid at all costs”, and (emphasis mine) “The single worst movie I’ve ever seen” were fairly representative. “Yes,” I thought to myself. “That just might be the one.”

I didn’t have terribly high expectations going into this film, but I did have expectations. I am happy to say that Don far exceeded what I expected from it. I really liked this movie a lot. It’s fast paced, super cool, emotionally engaging, and manages to work as a remake, homage, and re-imagining without ever losing the spirit of the original. I don’t see any reason one couldn’t easily be a fan of both the original and the remake. Given my druthers, I would have introduced Vijay earlier, rather than spring him all of sudden into the film with minimal explanation, but that’s a small quibble at best. I don’t know what the eventual outcome of the Amitabh-versus-Shahrukh rivalry will be, and I don’t really care. I’d be happy to hang out with or accept sartorial advice from either man.

Release Year: 2006 Country: United States. Starring: Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance, Sarah Carter, Devon Aoki, Natassia Malthe, Eric Roberts, Matthew Marsden, Kevin Nash, Collin Chou, Kane Kosugi, Steve Howey. Written by J.F. Lawton, Adam Gross, and Seth Gross. Director: Corey Yuen Kwai Writer: J.F. Lawton, Adam Gross, Seth Gross Cinematographer: Chi Ying Chan, Kwok-Man Keung [...]

For anyone who ever watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and was disappointed that, for all its over-the-top absurdities, it didn’t feature a scene where Harrison Ford punches a midget and makes him fly across a field, then Naksha is the movie for you. Only it’s not Harrison ford doing the punching; it’s action cinema mainstay Sonny Deol. But hell, if anyone in the world is going to punch a midget and make him fly across a field, then it’s going to be Sonny.

At the end of the day, Blood Oath is the rare micro-budget horror film that is more good than bad, and though it has obvious flaws in the scripting and acting departments, it manages to be a more enjoyable horror film than most horror films I’ve watched recently (and that includes not just micro-budget junk like Goth, but also big-budget junk like Hostel and those Saw movies — oh, how I loathe you, Hostel and those Saw movies). It’s well-directed, decently edited, and boasts characters you can easily tolerate. These “killer in the woods” films are sort of a horror filmmaker rite of passage. I think everyone has to make one before they can move on to anything else. Blood Oath doesn’t do anything different or overly interesting with the formula, but it does apply the formula in a decent fashion.