Horrorfest 2007’s final film may have been the most solid of them all. Crazy Eights deftly mixes the setting and atmosphere of the approximately brilliant Session 9 with the loose plot outline of The Big Chill, except if they were being haunted. After attending the funeral of a friend, six people follow a treasure map at his request to an old barn in the woods, where they find a time capsule full of their old toys from when they were kids. And, in the bottom of the trunk, they find the curled up body of a dead child. Almost from the start, the movie plays tricks on their (and by proxy our) perceptions. Freudian slips and flashbacks scattered throughout the film reveal that they know a lot more than they’re willing to admit, even to themselves. And after circumstance traps them in a nearby abandoned hospital, the dead girl has them right where she wants them.

Here’s the thing, though. It was a long weekend, and it was pretty late at night. Sometimes I drift off during movies, and I notice and fix the problem. In this particular case, I seemed to drift in and out of consciousness with perfect timing to follow all of the plot but miss all of the revealing moments that explained what happened so many years ago that they are now being punished for. And since I never had any plot gaps, I never noticed that I’d done more than close my eyes for a couple seconds. Sincerely: I stated aloud that the movie had to have another 15 minutes left in which the explanations come forth, about 45 seconds before the credits rolled. Then my friend amusedly explained to me what had happened. So, based on the atmosphere alone I say this is a good movie, and it looked like it had some pretty deep themes as well. But, I’m pretty much going to have to watch it again before I can give it fair due. Oops?

As with the previous two nights, Sunday started out with the weakest entry of the evening. Of course, there were only two movies on Sunday, which might make the claim seem somewhat spurious. But I promise, if you were to name any three horror movies at random, this would be worse than 98% of them. Nightmare Man chronicles the trials of a woman (portrayed by a very bad actress) who has ordered a fertility mask from Africa or somewhere because her husband (portrayed by a reasonably bad actor) is having performance problems, and she wants babies. Unfortunately, upon its arrival she starts to have dreams in which a man in the mask is trying to kill her, goes generally crazy, gets prescribed pills that she infuses with a talismanic power to keep the evil Nightmare Man inside her from getting out, and semi-voluntarily commits herself to a psychiatric hospital.

Except, on the way to the clinic the car runs out of gas, and she’s left alone while her husband forges ahead to a gas station. Whereupon I start to have Penny Dreadful flashbacks, insofar as there’s a girl in a car being stalked by some kind of bad guy. Except: is he real? Then, suddenly, the movie changes gears entirely, to a pair of couples in a cabin in the forest, playing erotic[1] Truth or Dare. The next fifteen minutes are a treat as we cut back and forth between the bad actress being chased by the crazy mask dude and the couples ramping up toward a pretty flimsy porno premise. And then, against my express wishes, the two plots collide when the couples hear the screaming woman outside and go find her. Of course, there’s no sign of her Nightmare Man, and the psychological games continue. Is he real? Is he her husband? Is she as crazy as she appears? (I mean, make no mistake, she’s crazy. It’s just a question of whether there’s really anyone out there, on top of her being crazy.) One thing I can say without it being a spoiler: sure enough, people start dying.

As bad as the acting was all around, there was one bright spot in Tiffany Shepis as the bisexual cabin owner with an NRA membership. In a sea of both character and actor mediocrity, she stood out as a shining beacon. The film itself tried to have the tongue-in-cheek badness of Saturday’s Lake Dead, but between the abysmal acting and an incomprehensible[2] final act, it was doomed to failure. Still, if you can forgive those things, which you should not, it was notable for providing me with the most opportunities to argue with the characters about how stupid they were being and how easy it would be to do smart things and maybe not die instead. On the bright side, karma was out in full force?

[1] I have no idea why this was specified, as there’s not any other kind of Truth or Dare that anyone has ever played.
[2] I mean, I know what happened. It’s just incomprehensible to me that the writers made that choice.

Saturday’s final film, Tooth and Nail, may well have been my favorite of the weekend. There are several I can point to along various axes and say, “I liked that because…”, but Tooth & Nail is the one whose scenes I’ve been flashing on whenever I think about the weekend. In a post-apocalyptic future (with a reasonably clever backstory), people must scavenge and struggle just to have sufficient food and water, but at least the initial waves of looting and killing have ended. Now, though, a new threat is rising in the form of bands of cannibalistic Reavers Rovers who roam the landscape in search of their own next meal.

And I know, I wasn’t all that impressed either. But it turned into something a lot bigger than its summary. The focus is on one such group of survivors, trying to eke out a day to day life in a hospital, rather than heading south where most people have gone. Out on a raiding party that includes one of the college kids from Borderland, they find the first live humans they’ve seen in months, in the midst of being murdered. They chase off the killer in time to save a girl, who turns out to be Penny from one of last year’s standouts, Penny Dreadful. (I mean, the actress, not the character. That would be cool, but somewhat unlikely.) And everything seems to be going pretty well, friction among some of the group members notwithstanding. But then their leader, Professor David Carradine, is murdered. And the next day, there are people outside the hospital. At this point, newcomer Neon (née Penny) admits to having heard of these Rovers before; they killed her family and neighbors where they were holed up in a supermarket. One per night, so the meat wouldn’t go bad. But she thought she’d escaped from them, and didn’t want to cause unnecessary panic.

A deadly game of cat and mouse ensues, as Neon and the others make various plans for survival, night after night, and each person must come to a decision about how far he or she is willing to go to stay alive. The final voiceover about fighting tooth and nail maybe oversells the message, but I can’t really think of another flaw the film had; and this one was quite a bit less glaring than the zombie people who looked like the rats that infected them, so.

The opening salvo of Horrorfest’s Saturday film list was a palate cleanser. I could also have said that of last night’s Unearthed, except that there was nothing to be cleansed from and that said movie really wasn’t as good. And, okay, I’ll be opening up a little bit of confusion by claiming that Lake Dead was a good movie, so I want to be clear and say that it wasn’t good. It was slightly better than the Skinemax fare it occasionally looked like, and it had a truly excellent climactic line of dialogue. But good? No.

It was, however, extremely awesome. Three sisters stand to inherit land and a motel from a grandfather they had been told was long since dead, after he’s murdered during a moral dispute. They gather up their skintight clothes, their slutty friends and frat-boy dates, and head off to check out the inheritance and decide whether to sell it. If it wasn’t for the inbred locals, this would probably have been porn instead of horror. The acting quality and the looks of the cast both bear this out. All of which is basically my point about the awesome: hilarity ensued at every point. The lines were funny on purpose almost as often as they were due to the acting failures, the slasher-style chase scenes had to have been intentional parody, and the foreboding “But is it really over?” finale was probably populated with the actors who hadn’t quite been skilled enough at their auditions to get into the real movie.

I think I’ve long since been established as a person who can appreciate a bad movie, if it’s done the right way. If you’re like that sometimes, this should be on your short list of rental gold. (Or, I guess it’ll still be in a theater near you sometime next week, maybe.)