Left for Dead (2007)

Best movie of this year hands down!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

I don't know how to describe Left for Dead. A western? A horror western? A paranormal western? a Ghosts western? no, just a piece of trash. This movie is a boring non sense from start to finish. Pyun direction is lazy and generic (he made some stylish action movies back in the 90s but here he flops). The script is awful, the acting is near as bad as in Zombieggedon and the worst thing here is the edition. Man!, the editor is an evil hack! All those stop motion scenes, fast motion, image freezing... they wanted to make the movie "cool", this is like a retarded no budget version of Domino(and Domino was indeed retarded). If you like Nemesis or some of those martial arts-sci fi Albert Pyun movies, stay away from this piece of boring, lazy and non sense crap. You will be very disappointed. 2/10

Back in the good old days, black blood in a color movie generally was reserved for zombies. (Zombies with embalmed bodies sometimes had green blood, apparently on the theory that formaldehyde resembles classic anti-freeze.) In LEFT FOR DEAD, director Albert Pyun seems to arbitrarily alternate between black and the red traditionally associated with living mammals. In like manner, he randomly shifts between focusing on a love triangle featuring a mom-to-be and a mom carrying her still-born baby around with her for days in a bag, and a demon bent on revenging his own ripped-from-the-womb babe from 15 years earlier. This is NOT as bad a flick as those rating it a "1" make out, but it certainly is not a "9" or "10," either.P.S.--I may not have seen a movie shot in Argentina before, but it tastes just like chicken.

I'm still going over the film in my head and I've watched the DVD twice as well. No spoilers as I just wanted to comment on the cast. I thought it was refreshing to see real women in a desperate situation unlike so many horror films which feature nubile bikini wearing females in desperate situations. The cast felt like women struggling to survive in the Mexico frontier in 1890. Hard, half daft, angry and frighteningly ruthless. They quite embodied what it must have been like and they also looked like the type that could believably survive. No cutesy starlet bimbo types, but tough, rugged women who look they live through much abuse.The feminine anger of betrayal and being degraded was etched into each character almost painfully.I thought the odd speech patterns worked as it revealed damaged minds and souls.The film wasn't perfect. The special effects could've been better and the action slowed a bit too much in the middle. Very sad and filled with a great helping of pain and grief. I found it riveting and much more enjoyable on the second watching.

I posted this in the message board but it might help here for those thinking of renting the film.I read this quote by Martin Scorsese discussing a 50's film (Underworld USA?). I think the quote sums up LEFT FOR DEAD too, "the revenge story because everything feels a little bit unreal, both heightened and elemental....diverges sharply from anything even resembling mainstream movie-making--he was through with politeness and any sort of decorum--he had no desire to pull any punches in order to reassure his audiences. He was moving closer to the approach to film-making exemplified by Jean-Luc Goddard in France--direct, impolite, jarring to life with a clash of juxtaposed images and sounds."