11/30/16 - Satanic (2016)

Satanic kind of pissed me off. More than most bad movies I see. Not because I was upset with the portrayal of Satanism or anything. Which I know nothing about, to be honest. Watching a lot of horror movies and listening to metal doesn't amount to much in that department. (Although I bet the characters in Satanic would tell you otherwise.) But Satanic commits two unforgivable sins: (1) it treats you like an idiot, and (2) it creates tremendously annoying characters, and then doesn't give you the satisfaction of watching them die. Boo on you, movie.

11/29/16 - The Death of April (2012)

The Death of April starts out really frighteningly. And not in an "oh my, this is scary" way - more like an "oh no, is this whole damn thing shot on a laptop?" kind of way. Turns out, it's about a young woman (confusingly not April) who kept a regularly updated video diary when she moved from California to the East Coast. But strange things are afoot in her new apartment, and luckily her video diary was there to document them.

And luckily for us, the video diary isn't the sole means of telling her story. The Death of April is set up as a documentary - so while the diary plays a big part, you also get interviews with friends, family, paranormal researchers, etc.

11/28/16 - The Giant Claw (1957)

The Giant Claw is pretty much perfect as far as super cheesy 50s monster flicks go. It's corny, kind of stupid, and overly earnest but still really fun. It moves briskly and has a goofy looking monster that you see cause a decent amount of destruction. Good times all around.

11/27/16 - Dark Amazon (2014)

Alexis, take me to Dark Amazon - where you can buy drugs and guns with one-click shopping? Or Dark Amazon Smile, where .05 % of your snuff film purchases will go to a charity of your choice!

Obviously, no. I doubt the fine folks at amazon.com would allow for such a thing to happen. This Dark Amazon is a crappy found footage jam about some folks searching for a cure for cancer in the Amazon. Rainforest, that is. Do you think kids today even know that the Amazon is actually a place and not a website?

Anyways, Big Spoilers ahead for a movie that I think you shouldn't see.

11/26/16 - Body (2015)

I think there should be some sort of genre/term for films where the characters back into a horrific situation by making really poor decisions. You know, where a group of generally okay people are innocently hanging out, an accident happens, and then it all goes to shit because of infighting or deciding to zig when you *clearly* should zag. (You know what, I'm making a "Bad Choices" tag. We'll see how much use that gets.) That's what's happening in Body, and it's kind of a horror movie by default. There's not a lot of blood or gore or anything, but these three women make a bad situation terrible, solely by their own making.

This is going to be a short and vague write-up. Body is the kind of movie where the plot is the movie, so describing it would basically ruin it. And it's a pretty decent watch. The set-up gives you a little to think about, and overall the film is well executed. It's not must-see, but it's solid.

11/25/16 - The Funhouse (1981)

Funhouse? More like Not-so-Funhouse, amirite? I just expected more from this film, I guess. What with the Tobe Hooper brand and the can't miss "slasher at a carnival" premise. (Both of which, it turns out, very much can miss.) The opening credits are pretty solid and are the highlight of the film. They're just tightly framed shots of creepy animatronics from around an old, rickety carnival funhouse. Unfortunately, it's pretty much downhill from there.

Especially when the very first thing you get (post-credits) is a shower scene with nudity from an actress that looks about 15. She was actually 18 or 19 at the time, but still. It's disconcerting, and not in a good way. Anyways, her little shit brother scares her - he grabs a bunch of horror paraphernalia from his room and pranks her by pretending to stab her while she's showering. First, gross. Second, it's set up like this kid will have *something* to do with the story. And while he hangs out at the periphery of the plot, he's literally a nothing character. It's hard to say why he's even in the film, other than to just pad the runtime. Maybe he had something better to do (like get killed?) in a different version of the script, but as it is he's just a waste of space.

11/24/16 - The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

More Hammer Horror. And it's still pretty darn good. I'll have to see if it's Mr. Peter Cushing that's giving me the vapors, or Mr. Terrence Fisher, who has directed all of the Hammer Horror up to this point. (And both seem to be involved with the next couple too - so, something to look forward to.) By all accounts, The Revenge of Frankenstein was shot almost directly after The Horror of Dracula (apparently even using some of the same sets), so I guess they were on a hot streak and just went with it.

11/23/16 - Feast of Flesh (1967)

Feast of Flesh is from Argentinian director Emilio Vieyra, also known for the X-rated The Curious Dr. Humpp. It's on the same Something Weird DVD as Night of the Bloody Apes, and as I was looking for something "Feast" related (Thanksgiving and all), it seemed like a good fit. And like Humpp, Feast features weird masks and a lot of sexuality - although nothing here is explicit, I assume it would still get an R-rating. The scenes with nudity are more uncomfortable that titillating - there's a sort of drugged/hypnotized thing going on in those scenes, but it's never graphic. And Feast plays like more of a creepy mystery rather than an outright horror film. It's confusing at times, but it's quirky enough to be kind of a fun watch.

11/22/16 - Witchcraft (1988)

I just noticed bunch of movies in the Witchcraft series showed up on Amazon Prime. I think there are like five of them on there. And this particular Witchcraft was not that great, but not bad enough that I'll avoid the sequels. But after a little research, it turns out there are 16 of these! Although from the imdb descriptions it seems like we just might be getting into softcore porn stuff the deeper we get into the series. (For example, for part 5: a warlock "uses beautiful, large-breasted, and frequently nude women to try to collect enough souls... [to] bring Satan to Earth.") We'll see what happens.

11/21/16 - Jebadiah's Axe (2013)

Jebadiah's Axe starts off like it could be some fun. It looks *super* cheap, but in an enjoyable way. You get a nice guffaw from the bad effects in the opening scene, and the acting (or lack thereof) makes you think you might be in for a treat, like Jebadiah's Axe might be an enjoyable bad movie. But once you get to the relatively unexciting story/main characters, it just kind of plods along. There's some laughs to be had along the way, and it's really short (just over an hour). But generally speaking it's kind of tough to get through.

11/20/16 - Decay (2015)

Decay is one of those movies that feels more like a 90 minute tone poem rather than anything that's intent on telling a story. Honestly, not a ton of stuff happens over the course of the film - it's more of a sparse, moody character study of this lonely and mentally ill man. There's not a ton of suspense or scares... just this clearly troubled person hanging out with a dead body.

11/19/16 - Horror of Dracula (1958)

This right here is a damned good vampire flick. And depending who you talk to, maybe the best ever? And a shame that I haven't seen it until now. I've never been a big vampire fan - there's just a lot of cheap vampire crap out there. And then, there's the whole Twilight thing... it just felt like the whole genre has been kind of diluted, and other than the stone cold classics (Tod Browning's 1931 version with Bela Lugosi) I haven't been all that interested in doing an awful lot of digging around. But I think Horror of Dracula should change that. Good thing too, because I guess Hammer made like 8 more of these. So that'll be fun.

11/18/16 - Death by Dialogue (1988)

I'm kind of loving these 80s movies from the Troma library. I perk up whenever I see the old, dull transfer of the Troma logo preceding a film. While their particular in-house brand of goofy gore (or whatever) doesn't really do it for me, they managed to accumulate a number of independently produced films that are weird enough to be enjoyable. Terrible gems? (Nightmare Weekend being my current favorite, I think.) Death by Dialogue is no gem, but it's dumb enough to be kind of fun.

Death by Dialogue has a premise that lets the film go pretty much where ever it wants to. There's this haunted script, you see, that generates scenes that makes bad guys materialize in the real world and kill people in crazy ways. So even though none of the kills here are particularly well-executed, at least there's a lot of variety to them. It doesn't change the fact that Death by Dialogue is a really bad title. While it's true that both words start with the same letter, even by the loose standards of this universe it doesn't make a lick of sense. No one dies by the spoken word. Oh well.

11/17/16 - The Alligator People (1959)

The Alligator People is one of those 50's monster flicks that feels rather dull by today's standards. It feels like not an awful lot happens - you kind of hope for more alligator people going berzerk. But Alligator People is content to keep the promised hybrids hidden until the end of the film. But there's actually a decently executed (if not generic and a little bit cheesy) story going on here. That and a few creepy touches make The Alligator People stand a little above the rest of it's late 50s/early 60s movie monster brethren.

11/16/16 - Invoked (2015)

I'm an idiot. My initial introduction for this was going to be "Hey, Netflix should have a 'found footage' tag, because I didn't really feel like watching one when I chose Invoked." But the description all but tells you: "Hey jerk! This is quite obviously a found footage movie!" ("Five friends boozing it up on a deserted island go missing. But their camcorder tells the terrifying tale of a seance gone seriously wrong.") So yeah - I need to read that shit a little more carefully.

But after having a hard time with Green Room, I was hoping for something stupid that would go down easy. And Invoked sounded like pretty straightforward Cabin in the Woods fare. But the first scene of the film is some cops literally finding footage. So the the filmmakers are taking the found footage concept quite literally, I guess.

And then the footage plays... and holy shit is it rough. For 15-20 minutes it flirts with being unwatchable. The characters are just yelling over each other, and all of their dialogue is obnoxious. (And almost certainly improvised - if someone actually wrote this stuff... yikes.) But it also has the sort of camera work that makes you nauseous. I like to think I have a good stomach for this sort of thing, but the shaky cam in Invoked was just too much. I was debating calling an audible and switching to another movie (which I don't like to do), but I stepped away for a few minutes, washed some dishes, and came back. And luckily, once our friends get to their destination the camera work settles down some. The people the camera are filming are still annoying, but at least you don't have to deal with motion sickness on top of it.

11/15/16 - Green Room (2016)

I really wanted to like Green Room. It got a ton of good press, has a lot of good people in it, and I really liked writer/director Jeremy Saulnier's last film Blue Ruin. And it's not like Green Room is a big departure from that film - I was expecting a lot of tension, explosive scenes of violence, and people making bad choices. But while Green Room is undoubtedly a well-crafted film, it was just a little too unpleasant for my liking.

And look, I'm bringing some baggage into this one. First off, our recent election. Seeing a movie about skinheads at this point in America's history just hit a with a little more intensity and hit too close to the bone. Patrick Stewart's skinhead gang leader Darcy probably has too much baggage to be a part of the Trump administration, but he sure as hell would have campaigned hard for the man. I just think it would have stung a little less had I seen it prior to November 8th, you know? I mean, if a really shitty ghost got elected president, maybe The Ghost Club would have been hard to watch too. Also, Dogs. Green Room prominently features a skinhead dude who has pit-bull attack dogs and uses them as weapons. He talks about dog-fighting and all that shit. Just the reminder that Yes, That Is A Thing That People Do just bums me out. And the dogs are in it quite a bit, and while they're not outright mistreated or anything, their presence still makes me a little sad. So I don't know - I'm not sure if I was just looking for escapism and got constantly reminded of several Real and Very Terrible Things, but those elements of Green Room just didn't sit well with me.

Maybe your mileage will vary.

11/14/16 - The Ghost Club: Spirits Never Die (2013)

I've never gone ghost hunting. It's not that I'm an outright skeptic - I've actually looked around at some local groups with half-serious thoughts about going. (Apparently, with some groups you can just pay and go on an investigation. Sweet!) But the fact that you sometimes have to sign a waiver absolving the group of any guilt if a demon follows you home... that's enough for me to take a pass. Even if I don't believe in 99% of it, I'm not risking fucking around with the underworld, you know?

Anyways, despite my lack of practical ghost hunting experience, I've seen a ton of ghost hunting movies. And while that certainly doesn't make me an expert, I think I know enough to say that the folks in The Ghost Club are really bad at it.

11/13/16 - Splatter University (1984)

I assume at some point in its development, Splatter University was known as Splatter High, because this here is one of the most unrealistic portrayals of college that I've ever seen. Maybe it was High and the filmmakers realized during editing that everyone looks kind of old? I mean, by the rules of the Splatter University universe, troublesome college kids are sent to St. Trinian's - a Catholic University - to get their heads on straight. I think if you're a troublemaker by that point in life, you generally ignore your parents and skip college, yeah? Splatter University plays it like it's military school for college kids, which just doesn't make any sense.

11/9 - 11/12/16 - 4 movies

So... I don't want to do this, but I may have to sacrifice writing regular entries for a few days. Something happened a few days ago that really took the wind out of my sails... guess what it was? I suspect there's a lot of wind missing from a lot of sails around the country right now, is what I'm saying. Anyways, I watched some movies, but just don't really feel up to writing about them in depth.

When I did this last time, once I missed writing about a couple of movies in a row, it was all too easy to fall behind. Which ended up creating a vicious cycle where I ended up not even wanting to write, missing out on entire months, and so on. Hopefully, allowing myself a little leeway here and there will make for a happier and healthier blog experience. I'm shooting to have my shit together by Sunday, but we'll see what happens...

11/8/16 - Black Water Sasquatch (2014)

Well, Black Water Sasquatch didn't stand much of a chance. My initial plan was to ignore the election news and watch a real movie... but then the results starting coming in. And much like an accident that you can't look away from (a racist, sexist, and hateful accident), I was stuck. I drifted in and out of a different movie, but once it became clear that my mind was guaranteed to be elsewhere, I wanted to find something that I didn't really care about. And boy oh boy, did Black Water Sasquatch fit the bill. And fair warning, I'm writing this on the day after the election and my brain still feels detached from my body - the news and the implications of it just haven't sunk in. But even if I wasn't 100% with it, I'm still fairly confident in my assessment: Black Water Sasquatch is really quite bad.

It's kind of funny, actually. Just the other day while writing about Black Water Wilderness, I mentioned how much I'd like to see a bigfoot-slasher hybrid, where the big guy goes after victims with a knife. Well, imagine my surprise when that's exactly what happens in Black Water Sasquatch! What a Black Water coincidence! I was pretty stoked. The bigfoot here looks terrible, but apparently he kills people and cuts off their faces (!) - at first, it seemed like there was some potential for some good stuff.

11/7/16 - Psychic (1992)

Undo / Redo in blogger is a real pain in the ass, you know? I had a big write up about Psychic here, and poof - it just disappeared because I was dumb and tried to change one line. So I'm pissed, and this is going to be maybe short and probably not good. Psychic wasn't an outright bad movie, but it's not one I feel the need to revisit again in any great detail.

When I was reviewing my blog entries up to this point, I noticed a big 1990s-shaped hole in what had been published up until now - and yeah, movies from the 90s probably won't be particularly well represented here. It's just not an era that I particularly care about. I don't know if it's from me being an 80s kid and the 90s just don't have the same nostalgic value for me or whatever, but I'm not particularly interested in them. My general (*very* generic) breakdowns for genre films:

11/6/16 - Robo Vampire (1988)

Where to even begin with Robo Vampire? It's crazy. The pitch must have been "Robocop fights vampires" - which is admittedly fantastic. But that's not really what made the final cut. Yes, there is about 20-30 minutes of "Robo Warrior" fighting hopping Chinese Vampires (and a topless ghost), but the rest of the movie is some completely unrelated drug war nonsense. I would bet big money that they filmed about a half-hour of Robo Warrior stuff and just edited that into a cheesy action movie. And as we all know, movies just mashed together in post-production never quite work out.

11/5/16 - Return of the Evil Dead (1973)

Hey! It's Return of the Evil Dead! I probably would have used a different font for that title. And also... I'm on vacation, and have come down with a little case of vacation brain. And I've also get a pretty nasty case of Election Brain. So forgive me if things are short, bad(der), or more random. As a great man once said, when referring to a story about underwears, "that's life."

Return of the Evil Dead is the sequel to the pretty damned good Tombs of the Blind Dead. Returning writer/director Amando de Ossorio abandons some of the things that made the first one work - the creepy graveyard atmosphere and temple ruins are gone, and Return does the standard sequel thing where it's shooting for more of an action-movie feel. Eerie atmosphere is more in his wheelhouse, at least on this budget - some of the action stuff here looks really cheap. But there's an undeniable power to the Blind Dead zombies, and the new setting (a populated town, rather than an abandoned temple) provides some good opportunities for a couple of decent setpieces. It's not as solid as Tombs, but Return is still a decent watch. Theres a Diminishing Return of the Evil Dead joke to be made here, but I'll be damned if I can find it.

11/4/16 - The Wailing (2016)

Hey! It's The Wailing! And I'm on vacation, and have come down with a little case of vacation brain. And I've also get a pretty nasty case of Election Brain. So forgive me if things are short, bad(der), or more random. Like Bruce Hornsby says, that's just the way it is...

I remember The Wailing getting really good press when it was released earlier this year... and now I'm kicking myself for not having seen it in the theaters. It's an engrossing film, but it's also kind of long (about two-and-a-half hours). Having the distraction-free environment of a movie theater would have been nice. Plus, it's got some shots that would have looked gorgeous on the big screen, and a couple of intense scenes I would have loved to see with a proper sound system.

11/3/16 - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Hey! It's The Curse of Frankenstein! And I'm on vacation, and have come down with a little case of vacation brain. And I've also get a pretty nasty case of Election Brain. So forgive me if things are short, bad(der), or more random. Seems like I have *more* to do when I take time off work, but whatever.

But The Curse of Frankenstein! I have always meant to see more Hammer Horror movies. They've got such a good reputation but I just haven't gotten around to them for one reason or another. And I figured I should start from the beginning, instead of just randomly jumping in somewhere in the middle. But after some free time at work, a little research, and some time on dvd.netflix.com (yep, I've still got an account), I've got about half of them queued up. Quick side note - they are obviously *old* DVD's - the "special features" are just blocks of text that you scroll through. How quaint. But the picture quality is never that good. Presumably there are better versions out there, but I've already met my blind buying blu ray quota for 2016. So to the outdated DVDs we go.

11/2/16 - Black Water Wilderness (2015)

Per Amazon: What happens when you mix Deliverance with Friday the 13th and a touch of the Breakfast Club, the result is Black Water Wilderness, a pulsating pounding action horror set in the frightening and dark backwoods of Alabama. Going camping in the woods will never be the same.

That's overselling it, as if the grammar didn't give it away. But there was still quite a bit I liked about Black Water Wilderness. It's definitely a horror film, but it makes a marked effort to try to throw a little story and teen angst in there too. Black Water Wilderness is no masterpiece by any means, and it's low budget seams show at times. But it's still a pleasant enough offering with it's heart in the right place.

11/1/16 - Crazy Eights (2006)

Crazy Eights didn't do a heck of a lot for me. It's got an okay premise: A group of childhood friends reunite after one of them dies - a la It - and of course they have a shared secret. Maybe even a supernatural one! And we know the secret has to do with "experimental facilities in the South" where children were basically bought from their parents, because the title card tells us so. While the whole "medical experiments on kids" angle is kind of cool, it's dealt with rather awkwardly and not in a satisfying way.  I almost wonder if the information got on a title card because they didn't bother explaining it well in the film? It's treated in Crazy Eights like a slow unveiling, and usually you don't have a title card spoil a reveal...so whatever. The important thing is that there's a ghost, and it kills people.

October 2016 In Review

All right - it's time for a month in review! Here's my thoughts from the the month that was:

October 2016

Best Movies

Peeping Tom
Deranged
The Neon Demon
Tombs of the Blind Dead