Something clever goes here.
The V/H/S/ series has been very hit or miss for me. It’s an anthology series, so some segments will work, some won’t. Generally, I think I haven’t enjoyed the interstitial elements. At some point, it might be worth doing a rewatch and ranking them.
This one, I think I like it better than the previous SciFi one, but not as much as some of the earlier ones.
Weird sad man goes into a haunted house to face his fears and livestream it. Good amount of spooky, humour, gore, with a decent plot.
Overall, I’d say this is one to watch. The main character is annoying, yet endearing, something that’s hard to pull off.
The ending also fairly solid.
Another somewhat mindless social media movie, about livestreamers in a house were satanic murders happened in the past.
Decent if extremely unlikeable cast, found footage style.
Some clever bits where the livestream elements actually impact the movie. One dude loses his phone, and whoever took it uses the livestream to lure him towards the swamp. There’s also the fact that they ignore the danger because there’s a history of pranks between the channels. Also the usage of the phones to mislead the characters, just works.
The starter to this year’s Spooky Season of Reviews, was Spree, a movie about a guy who wanted to be famous, and decided to become a “spree” killer, driving a rideshare car around Los Angeles, livestreaming his killing spree.
I’ve watched it before, so it seemed like a good rewatch to start things off.
The ending really reminds me of the Santa Barabara killer from a few years back, that whole incel and social media obsession.
It’s got some good scenes, and a great “final girl”
So, Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, is one I saw recommended by netflix and on facebook. The original language was likely Italian, but I watched the rather terrible English dub. Crazy old man, keeps to himself in his fortress in the forest. Little girl is being bullied, her doll’s head gets tossed over his fence, she learns about the devil locked in a cage in his house, and gets entangled in his life. And then we learn that the dude from the Gov’t who’d come to town and tried to arrest the blacksmith, is also a devil. Politics gets in the way, and long story short, the blacksmith goes to hell with a giant gold bell, to rescue the little girl, and annoy the devils. Weird movie. I was hoping for something like “Witching and Bitching”, but this wasn’t quite as interesting.
Officially, Law Abiding Citizen isn’t a horror film. But it starts out with something that would be at home in the rape-revenge horror category, a home invasion, murder of wife and daughter by creepy dudes. Then we get some courtroom bits, dealing with the system, and how people make deals. After that, we get the fun of the main dude beginning his revenge. Swapping the lethal injection chemicals for something messier, multi-limb amputation of the accomplice who made a deal to get off on lesser charges. And then we get into his revenge on the system. Bombs, killer robots, and more bombs. In the end, he gets tricked and hoisted by his own petard; or roasted by his own napalm, rather.
So, dude and random girl who dates his bully go into a closet as part of a Seven Minutes in Heaven that the bully orchestrated. Maybe he’s got a cuckold fetish, or thinks this will humiliate the dude? Not really sure. But they come out of the closet into a slightly different house, in a place where stuff is a little strange. He’s being accused of murdering someone with a pencil, and people seem a little aggressive, including his guidance counselor. After some strange twists, they learn that somehow they’ve ended up in some odd version of hell. And they have serious problems getting home. I’m not sure it’s really a horror film. I’m not sure what it is, really.
So, spoilers. Hiring a psychic to clean up the ghostly echos of all your murder victims, not a great idea, since the psychic might just learn that you are the killer, not the patsy you’d pinned it on. Not a bad movie, decent atmosphere. Not really sure why I didn’t enjoy this one, it had the elements for a decent film, but it just wasn’t all that entertaining.
Charlotte, was a weird anthology with a framework of an evil doll converting a babysitter into a doll. The first one, it seemed like a bargain basement Tales from the Crypt script. Jealous siblings wanting things that the other one wants, resulting in death. The second one, actually makes even less sense than the first one. Something about a woman, leaving her purse as bait to lure people into a trap. The third one, the babysitter tells a strange story about a troll, and then the troll shows up. And when the troll cuts off her feed, I grumble because using a sickle to make a vertical slash isn’t really possible. Then we have weird mind control girls scouts, and I don’t really remember the one after that. Then we have one with a little girl getting a doll, the doll being creepy, and the mom trying to kill the doll. Overall, pretty bad, pretty forgettable.
So, with Shux happening last weekend, and various other things going on, I haven’t been writing anything down lately. So, I watched a few movies, and I’ll try to put together a summary, though most of them haven’t really been worth writing about.
Triangle is an odd film.
And it’s hard to talk about without spoilers. So I’ll be somewhat vague, in case you haven’t seen it yet.
It’s a story with three sides. It ends where it begins, multiple ways. The short loop, of the wreck, the boarding, the murders and then the escape, are tucked into a longer loop of the whole day.
In some ways, you could argue this is related to Ground Hog Day. But the layering of the loops makes it far more sinister.
Though I suppose she makes less loops than he does. Though the seagull bodies on the dock hint perhaps not.
It’s worth seeing, to see the loops play out.
So Delirium, I wasn’t expecting much from it, dude gets out of a mental hospital and his parole is house arrest. His father’s dead, self-inflicted from a few days before, and his brother is stilling jail, his mother ran off when he was young, so he’s gone from being surrounded by people in a mental health facility to being on his own and isolated.
Naturally, he gets a bit weird. Especially when his parole officer decides to take his pills away.
Of course, we’re not really sure how much of the story is reality and how much of it is his head; normally that leads to an unsatisfying conclusion. This time however, they did a good job with the script, navigating us through the potential mess, and out the other side where things get darker and more interesting.
I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but it’s been my favourites of horror movies I’ve watched recently.
Mayhem, one of the first Shudder Originals that I watched, and possibly one of the reasons I signed up for Shudder in the first place. Well, that and it’s $5 to support horror movies. All things considered, this movie is pretty sharp and self aware. We’ve got a world where the rage virus exist, and the legal precedent has been set regarding murders committed while under the influence of the virus. Basically, you’ve got immunity to prosecution, if you’ve been infected.
Side note: It was phrased that a loophole got the case dismissed, which I think would actually mean that precedent wasn’t actually set, since a case has to be heard and decided to set precedent. At least that’s my understanding with regard to certain human rights cases I followed. They were dismissed on other merits, so the case law was never established.
The main character has just lost his job, a nice corner office gig. He’d been used as a scapegoat to cover up someone else’s error. Then the virus exposure hits, he tries to get back upstairs, gets taken to the basement for a beating instead. And then we have his long bloody climb from the basement to the penthouse, removing people along the way.
And of course, he’s accompanied by the person he couldn’t help earlier in the film, a woman whose mortgage had been bought up and foreclosed on by the company. He’d given her advice, but been unable to help her. And since she’d been a problem for security, she was also waiting in the basement for the cops when the virus quarantined the building.
It’s a fun tale of revenge, corporate power structures and toxic people. Plenty of violence, plenty of gore. Horror, though, less direct horror, and more just horrible people doing horrible things, before and after the rage virus.
So, the Collector, is a tense movie about a dude who does horrible things to a family, inside a house, and another fellow, who breaks into the house to rob it while these horrible things are happening. And it’s a damn creepy movie, with a good variety of disturbing traps. Most of the traps make some amount of mechanical sense.
And then we have the Collection, the sequel, where he goes from a horror movie bad guy to super villain levels of evil. We get news reports that he’s terrorizing the city, we get him committing mass murder at a nightclub, using a threshing machine to clear the dance floor, some sort of hydraulic press elevator to crush the people in the lobby, and some random blade traps. Cool traps, but a bit nonsensical compared to his previous set.
He kidnaps a girl, and in the process, on of his previous victims gets away. In the first one, we knew he brought his previous victims along to the new houses, though it wasn’t really clear why. In this one, he’s trying to complete his collection. Since in this film, he’s got a base. An abandoned hotel, the Argento, a nod to the famous horror director, I suppose. And the hotel is rigged with booby traps and filled with people he’s turned feral with drugs.
We get some scenes very reminiscent of a zombie movie, where the rescue team are shooting zombies. We get some traps, which make even less sense than the previous ones. And of course, we get to see his collection, various taxidermied folks, preserved in some liquid, that for whatever isn’t flammable. Which is important, since smashing these tanks provides liquid that puts out the fire that he’s started to destroy the evidence.
And of course, he gets away, and then our main victim tracks him down later, stuffs him in a box. Which isn’t really a horror movie ending, unless becoming the monster is the horror of it.
Really, I’d have a hard time imagining how the two films could be more different. The main characters are the same, but the motives, methods and abilities aren’t. Well, I suppose the burglar fellow uses his lock picking skills again in the second film.
I watched this one at a friend’s place. She is one of the few people I know with a Shudder account, and this Ruin Me, is another Shudder Exclusive.
It had some clever bits, some decent twists, and you spend a good portion of the movie wondering what’s real and what isn’t.
It starts as a roleplay weekend getaway, “Slasher Sleepover”. A handful of people meeting up at a creepy gas station to get black bagged, taken into the woods and then scared while they live out being in a horror movie.
In the end, I guess it’s worth watching. But it kinda falls flat when the motives come out.
It’s got some fun scenes though, and the characters aside from the main pair are entertaining.
So, I’ve seen this one on netflix as a suggestion a few times, but didn’t think it would be worth the watch. Well, The Ritual definitely has some amazing moments. Especially the first death, that sets the stage for the whole trip into the woods. It’s incredibly mundane and ordinary, but also rather gory. There’s just something heavy about that scene, and you really feel for the protagonist who seems to have a mix of PTSD and survivor’s guilt over how his friend died. And of course it doesn’t help that some of his other friends blame him for it. After all it was his idea of walk into that store, and while one of them died, he walked out without a scratch. It gets creepier once they get off the beaten trail, and at times I wondered how much his PTSD was screwing with him, vs something actually being wrong with their circumstances.
Overall, I’d say give it a watch, it definitely has atmosphere and some creepy moments.
So, Bedeviled, despite being a mashup of creepy phone app and spooky ghost, this one actually had some clever bits and scary scenes.
Ensemble cast of high schoolers get an app invite after a friend’s death, and it’s a personal assistant with some neat tricks that turn nasty fairly quickly.
The app acting as a bridge to the spirit realm, technology giving us awareness of them and them a way to reach us; sure it’s been done before, but they did it without it feeling rote.
Oh, and there was the clever callback where the one dude’s custom firmware was an issue.
Well, you start with some internet buzz words, like selfie, darknet, black rooms, etc, and add some mysticism, like the number 13, and a catatonic person with psychic powers. And somehow, it’s still not all that interesting. Sure, there’s a lesson about not being a dumbass online, especially not on the dark web, but beyond that? I can’t recommend it.
Purge Parody, with a black family named the Blacks, moving into a primarily white neighbourhood. Tons of racism, probably a bit hard to unpack. Some funny moments, some stupid ones. Watch it during a Purge Marathon, it’ll fit right in.
Tinder meetup results in sex then ghosting, followed by a suicide attempt and criminal charges. Overall, actually better than I was expecting. I’d actually recommend watching this one, though I’m not sure I’d qualify it as a horror movie, except maybe that dating these days is a horror itself.
So, I finished Ghost House, after not being up for it before. It had something of a swerve in the middle, where they are about to pass on the curse but decide not to. And of course a stinger at the end, where we can see that the cycle will continue. I’d give it a solid meh, it was alright, but nothing special.
Today’s Movie: The Purge: Election Year
Well, that was better than I expected. But I don’t think it was a horror movie. I think it was a thriller, or a action movie maybe. Maybe I should rewatch previous Purges. There is definitely some genre drift. If I recall correctly, the first one with the house invasion, that one was more of a horror movie. I’d have to pull up wiki summaries for the other ones, as I can’t specifically recall.
The purge as a concept is still horribly flawed, but as the series has gone on, they’ve plugged up some of the more obvious holes, and focused on the people who want something other than the chaos that the purge creates. And they added some nice touches with the economic reality of the Purge. One of the main characters this time around is just trying to protect his Deli, his livelihood, after the insurance company jacks up his premiums by thousands on the day before the purge.
Only one film tonight. Another haunted house film. This one, The Funhouse Massacre, was about a cult leader who was being held in the mental health equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.
No rights, no trials, no sentences, just lock up the monsters and leave them to rot. And this place had a nice collection of monsters. A dentist, a taxidermist, a clown themed wrestler, a cannibal chef, a nice ensemble cast. So cult leader dude, and his serial killer daughter orchestrate a fun house themed after all the various crimes, the perfect place for these guys to throw down after their escape.
Then you throw in a quirky collection of folks from the local dinner, a tough cop, a clueless cop, and some radio DJs, and you’ve got this gory funny halloween mess.
Of the stuff I’ve watched recently, this is the first one I’d recommend to people.
HellHouse LLC and HellHouse LLC II : Abbadon House.
So, these were a pair of found footage films about a haunted house, where dark rituals had been performed and a tragedy occurred. The news segments were pretty well done and felt like local news. The in-house stuff relied too much on the darkness and the cameras not being able to capture much. The supernatural elements also interfered with radios and cameras, meaning the cameras would start to fail when things got spooky. Sometimes this can work, sometimes this comes across as annoying; in this case, it comes across as both at different times.
I also attempted to watch Ghost House, a film about an american couple on vacation in Thailand, the american woman disturbs a “ghost house”, which wikipedia lists under the heading “spirit houses“. Disrupt the shrine, bad things happen, pretty plotline when foreigners adversely interact with folklore. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot another time.
A few years back, I tried to keep a log of my 31 days of horror movies. As I recall, it didn’t go overly well. I logged a dozen or so movies over a few days, then got distracted by something.
In an effort to bring this place back from the dead, now that I’ve made the effort to move it to a new host, I’ll attempt something similar. I’ve just resubscribed to Shudder, between that, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, I should have a decent catalog to work with.