12/2/16 - Witchcraft 2: The Temptress (1989)

So the first dialogue in Witchcraft 2: The Temptress is a spooky witch's spell. It made me laugh, so why the hell not:

12/1/16 - The Shunned House (2003)

So, this hasn't happened before... I was very ill today. I had some sort of bug or food poisoning or something like that where I was all sore and had the chills and whatnot. Not the ideal conditions for watching a movie. But, you do what you gotta do. I looked for something I didn't really care about, since it seemed like that I would be drifting in and out of it. Luckily for me, I picked The Shunned House - I stayed conscious for the whole thing, but the film sort of drifted in and out of itself. Let me explain:

The Shunned House is a sort of loose adaptation of three H.P. Lovecraft stories - "The Shunned House," "The Music of Erich Zann," and "Dreams in the Witchhouse." The film tells these three tales in a very non-linear way - in the "present" day, a couple is investigating an old house with a horrifying past (murders, mutilations, disappearances... all that good stuff). Basically, we are constantly cutting back to scenes from the house's past, which you eventually piece together into these separate stories. It's a discombobulating way to proceed, but it also kind of works. For some reason, equating "Lovecraft" with "Doesn't make sense" works for me. For being (obviously) low budget, The Shunned House gets a good mood going, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked.

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.