Best of cinema by Mad Movies. Part 3: 2006-2008

Every year my favorite magazine for action/horror/thriller/SF (Mad Movies) publishes the list of the best movies of the previous year (and the worst ones), according to its editors and an average for the whole magazine team.
I have gathered them for your here with a few comments. Enjoy!
All parts of this article can be found under this link.

2006 was not too bad it seems, and brought one very good movie in several different categories. Pan's Labyrinth was Guillermo del Toro's consecration, an excellent surprise and a choc, simply brilliant. Children of Men was also a surprise (I never heard of it before watching it, recommended by a friend), and anticipated a possible totalitarian future in the UK. The Devil's Rejects was the masterpiece of horror by Rob Zombie. After a first try with The House of 1000 Corpses, he really improved his skills and shares with us his (great) taste for show, action, colorful characters and music (what a nice soundtrack!).
After Pi an Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronowski continued to astonish me with The Fountain, and showed that you could make a good movie based on an idea (like he did later on with Black Swan), against the rule Hollywood followed in the next years of doing almost only remakes, sequels or movies based on a best-seller. Bubba-Ho Tep was a very gratifying B-movie with the excellent Bruce Campbell. Too bad that the prequel Bubba-Nosferatu has been cancelled. Snakes on a Plane was a lot of fun, a shameless action movie copying the 80's style.
Eli Roth was bringing something fresh to the torture porn with Hostel. In the genre of movies with a mad family, Christopher Smith was delivering with Severance something much better that Alexandre Aja with The Hills have Eyes. Maybe this genre doesn't fit with deserts.
The excellent Pusher trilogy by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) was conluding. Arriverderci Amore Ciao was a nice italian thriller, I found Flight 93 pretty well done, a good way of depicting the 9/11 events. I haven't seen World Trade Center yet (the one with Nicolas Cage). The Host and its monster designed by Weta (The Lord of the Rings) was nice, but 20 minutes too long as usual in Asian movies. The Pixal animated Cars is OK but surpassed by its sequel. Hard task anyway to do something after The Incredibles.
Dissapointement: The Departed by Martin Scorsese, pale shadow of the original from Hong-Kong.

Many sequels in 2007 and not much quality. The best for me was Hot Fuzz, good comedy and action movie with many references and British humor. I also loved the duo Deathproof / Planet Terror and the remake of John Carpenter's Halloween by Rob Zombie. The Legend of Beowulf was quite nice, as one of the first photo-realistic animated movies. Spider-man 3 was a good conclusion to the trilogy. I liked Shinobi, based on the old video game and a good Japanese adventure. Clerks 2 was good, a sequel to the excellent Clerks by Kevin Smith, with more money obviously. 300 was visually nice, but didn't bring much to the original graphic novel. William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) delivered Bug which is a very strange movie about pananoia but I liked it. 
Many OK movies: I am Legend, Sunshine, The Fantastic 4 and the Silver Surfer. I tried to watch the first minutes of Apocalypto, but it looks too cheap and shot with a VHS-recorded, I have to try again. I haven't seen the remake of Hitcher but it was probably useless. I didn't really like A l'interieur (Inside), although it made the first rank on the Mad Movies ranking, but I guess it is so because the directors are two former editors of the magazine.

Quite a large production of mad movies in 2008, and some of very good level, maybe the best year since 1998, the first year in this series of articles! Let us start with the best.
Both Frontière(s) and Martyrs were chocs, hard to watch until the end and with an abrupt conclusion not common in French films. They complete the personnal trilogy in my head together with the Belgian Calvaire (The Ordeal). I remember the evening when I watched back-to-back John Rambo and Cloverfield and loved both. The first one showed me that Stallone was a good director by telling a straight-forward war story and showing its atrocities and violence with no compromise. The second was disliked by many people especially because of the first half-hour, but I found it pretty original and very well done.
I also reacted strongly to The Mist as I wanted to kill the ultra-catholic woman in it! The Dark Knight was not well rated in Mad Movies, maybe because arriving too many years after Batman Begins, but it is now considered the best of the trilogy, and I agree to that. Wall-E is 1h30 of magic made real by Pixar, Death Note is a nice adaptation of the Japanese manga, CJ-7 is very funny and touching but was the last good movie from Stephen Chow. I was pretty scared by [REC], a very good use of the found footage style. Diary of the dead is nothing as scary but shows that George Romero can still do very good when he has artistic freedom. I like the Scottish post-apocalyptic Doomsday by Neil Marshall (The Descent) in spite of its defects. Iron Man was good but made you want some more, a wish unfortunately not well fulfilled by its sequel. It was nice to see Sam Worthington (Avatar) in his first big role in Rogue, a rather good Australien movie about a giant crocodile. Tokyo! was a kind of experimental movie composed of three segments and I liked its craziness. Cold Prey is a good mountain slasher from Norway, but not as good as the excellent 2006 Austrian In Drei Tagen Bist du Tot. After the Russian NightWatch, I liked the wild first Hollywood movie of Timur Bekmambetov: Wanted.
In the average section you find 30 Days of night in which the best comes from the graphic novel, the Day the Earth Stood Still is pleasant to watch, Death sentence and his vengeful Kevin Bacon could have been better, Star Wars: The Clone Wars has some great moments side-by-side with ridiculous ones, Hellboy 2 by Guillermo del Toro lacks something, the Kiwi Black sheep tried to reproduce the success of Bad Taste, Babylon A.D. by Mathieu Kassovitz has an interesting story by is too "French", The Orphanage is not as scary as it could have been.
In the bad section, only Vinyan by the director of Calvaire and from which I was hoping more, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem which is a vulgar attempt to make money on the name of the franchise, and Max Payne is quickly forgotten.
Some movies I have yet to watch: Tim Burton's musical Sweeney Todd, Death Race for some brainless action, Mirrors by the French Alexandre Aja (The Hills have Eyes) and Dario Argento's Mother of Tears which is suposed to be simply awful.

Stay tuned for the next episode, Part 4: 2009-2010