Tag Archives: horror

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

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I am really looking forward to when the podcast people watch a few movies in a row that I have already seen. I’m not saying I don’t like watching new things, but I am saying that I’m really trying to reduce the number of podcasts saved to my phone, and they[1] are not making it easy! This was filed under the scare of zombies and the style of bottle episode, which is insider baseball for “takes place all in a single location”. And then they had exactly six movies[2] that fit that bill, so they randomized one more time, to land on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, from when horror movies that were not deep and thoughtful were explicitly b-movie rolls, and leaned very hard into that aesthetic. Probably for budgetary reasons?

The deal is this: a group of six college or so theater kids, led by a [seventh?] avant-garde performance artist director, except really all of those descriptors are secret code for “is an absolute asshole”, land in their sailboat on a graveyard island[3] in, I don’t know, the Caribbean maybe? Then they snipe at each other, while the one girl with bugged out eyes whose acting style is to intensely watch everyone else as they snipe at other occasionally declaims oracular doom.

NOTE: Interrupting my flow to warn that I’m not exactly concerned about spoilers in this review.

Which (the oracular doom from before I interrupted my flow, I mean) makes sense in context, when you consider that the asshole director guy’s main goal[4] is to cast a spell with infant blood as the ingredient and Satan as the patron, to raise the dead and take control of them to use as he will. So anyway, the sniping and the spellcasting and the bugged out eyes and a handful of extremely gay jump scares constitute 80 plus percent of the movie.

Later, well, I think you can guess what happens later.

I don’t think absolutely every character gets what they deserve, but boy does the movie attempt to make a case for it. Independently of all that, the ending is kind of bleak, at least if nautical training transcends mere death.

[1] in the fall of 2021, at least
[2] Not counting options such as Night of the Living Dead that they’d already seen.
[3] No idea if this is a real thing, but apparently the idea is, the locals come out and hold funerals here, and it’s used for nothing else, and over time they re-use the same places over and over as decomposition progresses, so the bodies may be buried atop one another layers deep? Seems made up to serve the plot, but what do I know?
[4] aside from exerting his authority over everyone else

Lord of Illusions

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Another podcast movie, because there have been so many in a row I have not seen. The scare was witch, and the style was LA, and so here we are with a noir about male witches and real magic vs illusion “magic” and also good vs evil, by Clive Barker: Lord of Illusions.

It’s time I think to admit I don’t really get Clive Barker. There’s nothing wrong with this movie. It’s great to get to see Scott Bakula in his prime, and I like noirs that have modern[1] settings and sensibilities. But I feel like people get excited when they see Clive Barker’s name attached to something, and meanwhile, I have no clear idea what it is I expect when I see his name. I saw Hellraiser[2], and it was a weird family mystery that had far fewer Cenobites than were advertised to me by pop culture, and then this is a weird almost-family mystery that’s also an almost takedown of pop culture magicians like David Copperfield, plus the whole noir with the maybe but maybe not treacherous femme fatale, and a dude with his head in a spiky box who is the bad guy. I think I even liked it, but I definitely didn’t get it.

The surface level plot made sense from moment to moment, but if there’s an essential Clive Barker-ness, I am just out of the loop, that’s all. Anyway, cool magic show, somewhat incomprehensible final battle, hyper-young Famke Janssen, and best use of the Ten of Swords I’ve ever witnessed. (Plus it was awesome that the mysteriously unrevealed tarot card wasn’t just Death like always.)

Whatever else it was, I’ve talked myself into remembering that it was very stylish, and that’s not nothing.

[1] Look, I get it, the ’90s aren’t modern, I’m just old. But still!
[2] Not reviewed because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, and Joe Bob says so much about a movie that I don’t know where my opinions end and his begin.

Send Help

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During the previous date night, we saw previews for the new Sam Raimi film. Lo and behold, new date night happened soon enough that we actually got to go see said film, after sushi dinner. Yay, date night!

So, Rachel McAdams is a frumpy[1] single lady with a pet bird, a Survivor audition tape, and dreams of corporate promotion. Unfortunately, her old boss[2] has recently died, and his inheriting son has no real interest in her qualifications for the new Vice President position, because his frat bro is available, and also as I may have mentioned, she’s frumpy. But, because she’s actually talented at her job and they might lose some business, she’s invited along to Bangkok to close the big deal. Which is why she is available to wash up on an island down the beach from her boss when the plane unexpectedly crashes into the ocean on the way there.

Bam! Premise of Send Help achieved.

The boss guy is, as previously hinted at, kind of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick, even. And Rachel McAdams is a little bit over the top with her intensity, even though she is certainly the aggrieved party. If this were on the Hallmark Channel, she’d soften his rough edges and he’d get her to let her hair down and they’d build a cozy island paradise for themselves. But it’s a Sam Raimi movie, so instead this is all psychological cat and mouse as we wait to see just how real that intensity is, and/or just how ingrained the dickishness is. Can they survive the elements and the circumstances and each other? It sure is fun (and hilarious and disturbing and disgusting) finding out!

Plus, get her away from the makeup artists for a few weeks, and she doesn’t look very frumpy at all. Funny how that works.

[1] If she was ten years older, I think they might have even gone for dowdy
[2] Portrayed via somewhat subtle implication by Bruce Campbell

Noroi

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Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2

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I know what you’re thinking. Who gave those people more money?

I’ll do you one better. This was enough more money to improve everything about the premise. Better filmstock, better camera work, an actual plot, longer sex scenes of sufficiently improved quality that I think this has to fall into a heretofore unexplored genre, erotic horror[1]. It’s even feature length, albeit only like 75 minutes not counting the credits and slightly less damning blooper reel. (I’m pretty sure this one didn’t have an intimacy coordinator either, though.)

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2 picks up the very next day. Apparently, the woods in which the original fuckery occured butt up against a summer camp, which is just opening for the season. And you know what that means: horned up counselors who are at least a couple of days away from having any serious responsibilities. (Also, a folksy nurse trying to be an adult to the teens and a handyman with a dark and mysterious past, because why not?)

So before you can say “fuck me in the, heehee, woods“, you’ve got a blood-soaked final girl warning all of them about what is about to happen, nobody listening, and a swarm of penis-shaped slugs penetrating anything that moves. Anybody can die at any moment, and since I know you’re going to ask: yes, they left things wide open for number three.

If there’s anything disappointing about this franchise, it’s that the premise is not quite as straightforward as it could be. There are at least a few people who not only don’t fuck in the woods, but even one or two who never actually try to. And yet, this does not grant them any form of immunity to the coming bloodbath. So I guess you might as well just do it, right?

[1] Erotic thrillers? The ’90s are littered with them. Softcore porn pretending to be light horror? Sure, Misty Mundae will always be the queen of that barely explored subgenre from the Oughts. But actually a horror movie with enough sex scenes to be erotic yet not so many or so explicit to move into being porn instead? I’ve never seen it happen until today.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods

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The last time I saw a movie that was this refreshingly straightforward about how things would go, it was Stay out of the Fucking Attic.

So the deal is, some young adult types (the couple who arrived early only to mysteriously vanish, the sister of the girl in that couple and her girlfriend, a preppy couple, a stoner, and a video store chick) go camping in the woods. In many cases, these people engage in some form of sex, in direct contravention of the film’s title.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods is director Shawn Burkett’s distillation of every ’80s slasher movie in a rural setting. Skip all the backstory about the tortured summer camp cook or twin survivor of a boating accident or rabid grizzly bear and just go straight to a creature who hunts by sex pheromone or something, and don’t even explain that part, just film some people fucking so later you can film them being eviscerated. There’s no foreplay here, just a lean hour[1] of badly filmed sex and violence.

But you know what? Expectations were solidly met.

[1] It says 73 minutes, but don’t be fooled. That’s three minutes of showing the cast at their nudest and most bloody under the name cards of the actors, followed by a ten minute blooper reel in which they make it abundantly clear that this is not the kind of production that hires an intimacy coordinator.

Kandisha (2020)

Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.

Son (2021)

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My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.

That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.

So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.

That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.

Vicious Fun

A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

The Vampire Lovers

It has recently come to my attention that Amazon Prime Video is home to a treasure trove of exploitation cinema, ancient and modern alike. So, that will be an occasional thing.

One thing I will always miss about the ’70s is how straightforward everything is. If someone tells you a movie title and a one sentence thumbnail description of that movie, you will know exactly what you are going to get. This time out, The Vampire Lovers, which started in media res, except really more like in endia res[1], so much so that I quickly researched if it was a sequel before I got past the first 3 minutes. It is not, but it apparently is the first in a trilogy, to my surprise. Maybe I’ll watch the others sometime, who knows!

Anyway, this guy a lot of years ago relative to the main setting of the film (1700s or 1800s, maybe?) is narrating a diary in which he set out to avenge his sister by defeating a nest of vampires, which he accomplished by stealing their shrouds to drive them out of whatever and then staking them or cutting off their heads, since nothing else can kill a vampire. (It is important to lay out the rules early, since they are so variable between vampire continuities.) Despite an early attempt at death via seduction, he is largely successful, only he missed one because he got tired or something.

Fast forward a generation or two, and we are watching people dance at Peter Cushing’s house, including some lady’s newly arrived niece, who only has eyes for Peter Cushing’s daughter. Before you know it, she’s going full Dracula seduction on the daughter, and before you know much more the daughter is dead of two puncture wounds in her left breast. The movie proceeds from there about as you’d expect, with the caveat that I did not expect there to be so many scream queens. I don’t know why, I just didn’t.

In conclusion: vampires! Who are also lesbians! That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

[1] Or insert your own Latin for “at the end of things”