So I love horror films of all the sub-genres and I would be the first to argue that there are horror films with as much artistic merit and importance as any drama or documentary.

But I also tend to enjoy a lot of the schlock that the genre has to offer, and frankly I can't help myself from feeling a little bad whenever I interrupt an important discussion in the FDT to say that I re-watched Killer Klowns From Outer Space. It feels a little ridiculous. And with the frequency that I (and I believe several others here on the forum) watch horror films, I thought we could use a thread devoted to horror discussion.

Last night I watched what would be a perfect example of campy, crappy horror so it's a great time to start this thread methinks.

No Man's Land: The Rise of Reeker is one of the past set of "8 Films to Die For" (now titled "Ghost House Underground") and it is the sequel to a horror film that came out a few years ago and was simply titled Reeker.

The original was an interesting little slasher that suffered from some poor writing and acting (pretty typical of the non-theatrical horror) but overall I thought it was "okay". I could say the same for this, a sequel/prequel with pitiful characterizations and acting...but damn was it ever fun!

I just really like the whole concept behind the "Reeker". It's a great twist on Final Destination's ideas, but we actually see the Reaper (Reeker) as he dispatches his victims.

Here's a brief overview of how the Reeker formula works:

A small group of people become stranded somewhere in an American desert. Towards the beginning of the film there is a catastrophic event that they all survive (a car crash, explosion, whatever) and then suddenly they begin experiencing strange things. Phones are dead, they seem unable to leave the area, etc. Then they notice the smell...the reeker. The smell of rotting flesh, the stench of death. This being, the Reeker, kills them one-by-one in gruesome fashion with a variety of bastardized medical equipment for optimal grossness in the effects. Then at the end of the film, we get a flashback to that catastrophic event where we see that all of them actually died, and in similar fashion to how they were killed by the Reeker in this Purgatory-like world (for example, if someone is impaled by one of the Reeker's blades, then in the "real" world they might be impaled by a shard of metal from an explosion).

It provides the same kind of outlandish death scenes that Final Destination is known for, but I just find this "universe" to be more interesting. The Reeker himself is actually kind of creepy, and in this sequel/prequel No Man's Land, we discover a "secret" behind Reeker and where he comes from that would potentially allow for an infinite number of variations on the formula, locale, and of overall approach to the story.

It's nothing groundbreaking and I hesitate to even call it "good", but I really had fun watching this one despite the fact that just about everything about it is awful. It's paced really nicely and has great payoff, and I hope they make more of these because I'd definitely see them.