I knew almost nothing going into this, not even that it is has been almost universally panned. It was pretty bad, shoddily written, terribly shot, poorly acted... I can't really think of a redeeming characteristic. I guess it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but man it was just bad.
I would recommend skipping it if you were thinking about checking it out. Unless you love seeing Pepsi advertised a dozen times in a movie. Then it might be for you
I could have sworn someone mentioned this before, but a search didn't yield results. Basically, this is the "War of the Worlds" for British TV. A sly found footage style movie that replicates a live broadcast from a haunted house.
A mother and her two girls think they're being haunted by a ghost, and a BBC TV program goes to the house live on Halloween to investigate. There's a few twists and like any good horror, things start to go wrong.
The thing I really liked about this was the little details that kept up the realism. Uri Gellar and CSICOP were name-checked, they made references to "real" parapsychology experiments. This was fun, but gets a bit muddled at the end.
I didn't actually watch much movies over my vacation - spent more time reading.
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)
Classic title, decent low-budget movie. A troop of young actors follow their controlling director onto an island where he has planned a series of mindgames around a spellbook he found that purports to raise the dead. He uses the threat of unemployment to make the actors play with corpses. Eventually, the spells work, and the dead come to life.
The bulk of the horror is how the director bullies his actors. The zombie action is fairly late in the movie and I think most people would find this pretty dull.
Night of the Demons (2009)
A remake of the 1980s classic.
Angela (Shannon Elizabeth) is the local wild girl, and she decides to host a Halloween party at an abandoned mansion where 6 people disappeared almost 100 years ago. The party seems to be going well until the cops bust it up for no reason. After the bust seven people remain, which happens to be the perfect number for the demons in the mansion to enact their plan to be released on the world. Angela is the first to be possessed, then dead meat 2-5 get taken in quick succession. We're left with nice stoner guy, bad drug dealer guy (Eddie Furlong, who looks awful), and final girl Monica Keena. The script decided that Furlong and Keena's characters had a relationship in the past, but Keena is so far out of Furlong's league that they needed to add an exposition scene to explain why. At any rate, the remaining three get terrorized by demons until it all comes to an unsatisfying conclusion.
While this had some fun scares and some cool ideas, it's pretty bland and annoying otherwise. There's a lot of 2000s horror movie tropes in this that aged terribly, and it looks bad overall. The remake fell into the modern trap of pretending this needs to all make sense, so there's a lot of unrealistic exposition, and it's provided (in writing) by the only person of color. Somehow, the stock characters in the original seem more alive and realistic than the generic clump of people we're given in the remake.
This was a miss for me, I didn't hate it, but I can't recommend it, especially when the original is better. (For my money, though, Night of the Demons 2 is the best of the series.)
Mute Witness (1995)
Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) is the special effects/props person on a cheap horror movie being directed by her brother-in-law in Russia. She's good at her job, but is mute and has some communications issue with the rest of the cast and crew. At the end of the shooting day, she gets locked into the studio for the night. She's trying to get out when she sees some activity in the studio. She goes to get help, only to realize that some of the crew members are shooting a snuff film.
She tries to sneak away, but makes enough noise that it raises the suspicion of the crew members. There's a long sequence where she's trying to get away from the people looking for her, and it's about as thrilling a cinematic moment as I've seen. She eventually gets free, but the crew has done just enough cleanup that they convince the police it was a screen test, not an actual murder. Later, the two men are convinced by their boss to make sure to tie up any loose ends...
This is a pretty great thriller. The escape sequence is so good that the rest of the movie is a bit of a letdown, but it's still fun and interesting, with a few more plot twists. I liked this a lot.
Monster movie from the 1950s. Straight-laced all-around good guy Chase scrapes a living together by running his dead father's garage. When he's not supporting his family, he's hanging out with his French exchange student girlfriend, being the moral center for a group of hot-rodders, and singing his original songs. When a couple he knows goes missing, he helps the sheriff find them. Soon other people start to go missing, and the local big wig — the father of a missing girl — is causing trouble for Chase and the Sheriff. The cause of the missing people is soon discovered, and Chase takes it upon himself to rescue the town from the Giant Gila Monster.
This was thoroughly OK monster movie. They mixed footage of a live lizard stumbling around models with people reacting to it. It does an OK job of matching the scenery between the two, but any action by necessity happens off screen. We focus more on Chase and the people around him. This movie falls apart if you don't like working-man hero Chase, and I was fine with it.
Not something anyone needs to seek out, but it's not gonna be a bad experience if you do.
Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is pretty great. So, I watched this without knowing anything about it and its production history. Now I wished I hadn't, both because I didn't like it, and how Kinski behaved on the set. Apparently, Kinski was both unprofessional and sexually assaulted his female co-leads. Now I feel kind of gross.
Set mostly in Venice, a professor versed in vampire lore (Christopher Plummer) goes to Venice to investigate Nosferatu's last known appearance. The local royal family has a history with Nosferatu, and they want the professor's help to clear the family of it's vampiric curse. They unintentionally summon Nosferatu back to Venice, where he successfully turns one princess, but her sister, possibly in a bid to save her older sister, willingly offers her love to Nosferatu, which will allow Nosferatu to become mortal again and die. After she does this, a group of men led by the older sister's lover hunt the vampire and unintentionally wound the younger sister. Nosferatu hunts the men down, and walks off into the fog with the dying woman, fates unknown.
Basically, this mostly consists of Klaus Kinski wandering around a foggy Venice in a silly costume. It doesn't have the decency to make Venice interesting on film a lot of the time.
I found this somewhat tedious and incoherent, with Ed Wood levels of day/night inconsistency. Apparently Nosferatu is indifferent to daylight and crosses now. I think the production only got a fraction of the script filmed and they lost their license to film in Venice and continued the shoot in another venue, which makes the visual narrative of the film confused.
The draw for a movie like this is weird-ass Kinski acting like a weird-ass vampire, and this is an uninteresting performance, plus now I know he was a terror on set. Really not worth anyone's time.
That reminds me, at mine we're part way through a complete chronological viewing of Nicolas Cage films. We're up to 1991 so there's been both fun and stinkers.
If you've ever wondered what "weird-ass Kinski Cage acting like a weird-ass vampire" might be like, check out Vampire's Kiss.
AFAIK the only sexual assault on set was in the script rather than for reals.
I got this free as a promotion, so I can't be too hard on it. It was more than entertaining enough for the price.
The story opens with our heroine Mary (Simone Kessell) jogging through the woods, coming to an isolated graveyard, she hears a sound and runs away, only to be pursued by a knife wielding man. She finds a way to subdue him and then takes him to her house.
She intended to be stalked by this man, who is likely the killer of her daughter. She has turned her basement into a torture chamber for him. Over the course of the movie, we learn more about Mary and her insane plot to get revenge on her daughter's murderer.
It's insane because Mary has set up the torture chamber to reveal to the killer... what she knows about him? The basic premise is that he has a pattern of behavior and she wants to inflict the same tortures on him that he does to his victims, so she feels she needs to preface each torture room with some exposition. However, the killer isn't stupid, and figures out a way to throw a few snags in her plan — She's an engineer, but no Jigsaw. He gets out of his torture chamber and pursues her through the house.
All while this is happening, we get some flashbacks on Mary's life before this, her life with her daughter and how Mary finds the killer.
I found this movie both somewhat enjoyable and frustrating. Mary is shown to be intelligent and resourceful, but I had trouble believing a meticulous engineer and planner would throw all her plans out once she hit a few snags. There are multiple times when she chooses to try to force him back into her torture basement when she had an easy opportunity to kill or hobble him. I know in the world of the movie, it's more important to her that she makes the killer follow her narrative, but shoot him in the leg and let him bleed a bit before you do, all right?
The death of a man leaves his two daughters to manage their grief. One daughter was abandoned as a child, and another grew up with him as a loving, involved father, so they have a bit of trouble bonding. Unfortunately, the sadness takes the form of an orange clad jester who kills people.
This is a movie that wants to Say Something, you have a melodrama about two daughters with entirely different opinions about their biological father, but it also wants to be a Cool Supernatural Horror. It doesn't really work, especially the melodramatic parts. It visually pops when The Jester is on the screen, but drags when the characters are just talking. This is exemplified by the actor who plays The Jester and another character called Liam. The Jester is pretty interesting, but Liam is stiff and boring.
It was right around 90 minutes and not all bad, so this gets my coveted "barely acceptable" rating.
Nic Cage plays a father raising two teenage sons after a post-apocalyptic event. One teen is a bookish homebody and the other is more wild and has discovered girls (well girl is more accurate). The wild one has an accident and gets trapped outside at night. Nic Cage gets injured rescuing him, and the boys deal with it in different ways until they have to band together to save themselves from an escalating threat.
This is a pretty basic story, two boys coming of age and they have more feelings than sense, combine that with them living in a wasteland where monsters stalk at night. I found it OK.
An alien creature crash lands in rural Maryland and goes into a rampage. A few people remain in the town to fight it off.
This is a solid but very low budget "creature attacks a small town" type story. There's an evil alien, a band of stalwart heroes, a miscreant, and a corrupt mayor here. The heroes are dwindling in numbers protecting the town while the bad guys thwart their attempts to defeat the alien. Even though the acting is universally bad, I was surprised that I actually cared about one or two of the characters (well, mostly just Steve).
Otherwise, the low budget really does this movie in. There's a bunch of continuity errors. There's no strategy to the rampaging alien, it appears and leaves as the movie dictates, but it makes no real sense. There a character that appears in the last act just so he can be killed, and it's obvious it was edited in. The special effects were better than I expected, with a few clever gags, but overall not very good.
This also gets my coveted "barely acceptable" rating.
In an exclusive boarding school for girls, a clique of popular girls conduct a seance, frightening one girl, who apparently commits suicide as a result. Not being too sentimental, the school headmistress quickly replaces the dead girl with Camille, who instantly clashes with the clique. Soon those girls start disappearing. Is the new girl to blame, or could it be the vengeful ghost that's rumored to haunt the school?
Spoiler:
It's neither, it's the most obvious person (the son of the headmistress) and one of the clique (the "smart" girl). "Camille" is a friend of the 1st dead girl and came to investigate, oh and there's really a ghost, but it's not murdery.
I put this on while making dinner tonight, and I thought this was pretty decent. It was a spooky haunted school murder mystery. It had a handful of tense and scary moments,
It wasn't flawless. A few too many people were holding the idiot ball, including all adults. The boarding school "girls" all looked at least 20. Suki Waterhouse, as Camille, was 29 and looking like a full grown adult. She was pretty great otherwise, but she looked more like she was a Senior in college, not high school.
Clint Eastwood plays Wes Block, a divorced dad and homicide detective living in New Orleans. When someone starts raping and killing sex workers, Block starts investigating, and by "investigating," I mean finding a sex worker, asking a few questions, and then taking them up on their services.
Block seems to like how this "investigation" is going and starts getting more exotic in his sexual tastes. Unfortunately, a chance encounter between the two men means the killer is now also obsessed with Block, the ladies he visits, his new girlfriend, and his family. Will Block save the people he cares for? (answer: mostly)
This is a 1980s Clint Eastwood mainstream movie so the sex isn't too exotic (or explicit), but it's kind of surprising how sleazy Eastwood's character is. It's not stated anywhere, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't actually pay for any of the sex work he engages with.
Otherwise, Eastwood's pretty good, and he has an easy rapport with Geneviève Bujold as the potential love interest and the kids (easier because one of them is his daughter), but the hunt for the bad guy is a bit of a drag and it's not really nasty enough to make it good sleazy fun.
I haven't seen the previous movies, but the premise is pretty simple, violent aliens attack the Earth. They are sightless but can locate things by sound.
Lupita Nyong'o is a hospice patient going into New York City for a visit right when the aliens attack. She survives the initial attack and decides she wants to get in a little bit of living.
I was surprised how much I liked this movie. I mean this provides a lot of spectacle, as you'd expect, but Nyong'o is so amazing it elevates the whole thing.
Put Barbara Crampton on the cover of your movie, and I'm going to watch it.
Two estranged brothers meet up at their father's video store. He disappeared a few months before and now they're getting around to settling his estate. They start packing up the store and eventually find what the father was doing just before he vanished. He was playing an old VCR game called "Beyond the Gates." They play it to get a clue as to their dad's mindset and soon odd and deadly things start happening as they're forced to play the game to its conclusion.
There's a core of a good movie here, but it's slow at 84 minutes partly due to lifeless performances by the male leads. The budget is clearly too low to execute the story well. However, casting Crampton as the ethereal host of a VCR horror game is a good idea, she gets the material and delivers just the right performance.
I was a bit disappointed by the ending.
As a cosmic horror you expect the people involved to be touched (or tainted) by the supernatural experience. You don't expect them to just walk away, but that's what happens. They win the game and are set free. I'd have considered the movie a whole lot better if they seemed damaged somehow at the end.
Foster child and teen athlete Jonathon (Peter Berg) seems to have developed a psychic connection to serial killer Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi) after he annihilates his foster mother and siblings. Despite his beefy size and pronounced limp, Pinker seems to be able to go into anyone's home and kill without being detected — perhaps because he's made some sort of deal with the devil.
Detective Dad chooses to believe in this connection and uses information from his son to locate Pinker. This goes awry and Pinker gets revenge by killing Jonathon's girlfriend, Alison. Eventually, the Dad exploits his son's connection again and catches Pinker, sending him to the electric chair.
Pinker has one more trick up his sleeve. He completes a black mass in his cell and gets the ability to move from body to body via electricity (or something), he can possess the body for a while before draining it and needs to move on. Having avoided execution, e starts trying to get revenge on Jonathon in various bodies. Pinker also figures out how to travel via electrical current.
However, Alison is so good and pure and smoking hot, she comes back as a ghost to help Jonathon to defeat him. He comes up with a plan to neutralize Horace Pinker once and for all.
This movie a a lot of wild, wild fun. Mitch Pileggi is 110% over the top this whole movie. It's not even remotely realistic, it doesn't really make any sense, but it's very entertaining. To be clear, the movie's story is coherent — you know what's happening and why, but it's nonsense because the rules that the heroes and the bad guy follow are inconsistent, Pinker seems to gain and lose powers as it benefits the plot, and there are huge inconsistencies in the plot itself, the plot seems to be just enough to get us to the next "wouldn't it be cool if..." scene. This movie would fall apart except most of those scenes really are pretty cool.
So, this is great if you just accept what it offers.
It's a VHS cover I can remember seeing nearly every time I went to the store.
Same here. I think I was originally turned off by Siskel & Ebert's review at the time, but back then I didn't know Wes Craven or that he directed this. I think I first saw this in the 2000s.
It's spooky season, but I haven't watched as much horror as I'd like. Here's what I've watched so far.
Hush (2016)
A deaf woman is living alone in a rural wooded area while trying to write her latest book. A psycho killer discovers her and proceeds to toy with her.
An early work of Mike Flannagan, seemingly done primarily to get himself and his wife Kate Siegel work. They received some criticism for giving the lead role to a non-deaf actor, which is fair, but it doesn't detract from the actual movie. This was well done and thrilling.
V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
A better than average "V/H/S" movie, but I've mostly forgotten this already.
Abigail (2024)
A group of criminals kidnap a crime boss' daughter, and hold up in a mansion to watch her and wait for the large payout. The group soon discover that she's no ordinary child and they're in more danger than they thought.
Stupid fun. This is not scary so much as moody, gory, and funny.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Carpenter and Hill's original vision for the "Halloween" series was an anthology series centered around the holiday, but everybody wanted more Michael Myers, and so this movie flopped. It's a shame, because like the hosts of the "Kill by Kill" podcast say, this isn't a good movie, but it's a great movie.
Tom Atkins is at his maximum 80s manly manliness as alcoholic Dr. Challis. A man comes into his emergency room screaming about how they're trying to kill us all. Everybody thinks he's a bit nuts, so they drug him up and stick him in a room. Later that night a man in a suit walks in, murders him, casually walks out of the hospital, and lights himself on fire in his car, blowing it up. Dr. Challas is shocked by this, so he teams up with the man's daughter to investigate the Shamrock novelty company and their new line of Halloween masks.
This is a movie where all sorts of stupid, seemingly nonsensical stuff happens, yet it all seems to come together in a moody, tense horror story that just works.
The Rob Zombie Halloweens (2007 & 2009). I had never seen the 1st, but I previously watched the 2nd for the Weird Al cameo. These are both kind of bad and unnecessary, with the first really going deep into the white trash aesthetic Zombie loves so much.
Longlegs 2024
Maika Monroe is Agent Lee Harker, a very reserved agent who has a 6th sense about evil is assigned to the team hunting "Longlegs" a serial murderer of families. The case winds up being more personal, as Longlegs knows who she is. Longlegs is played by Nic Cage, in a classic Cage performance.
Noroi: The Curse (2005)
A documentary filmmaker who deals in supernatural subjects has several subjects that connect together around a demonic curse. The found footage format was annoying, but the story was interesting.
Eight Eyes (2023)
Set in Serbia and Macedonia, a married American couple crash a wedding, then foolishly trust a man they meet. They allow him to give them a guided tour of the country, which ends badly, of course. A gritty 70s-style exploitation film which I found generally unpleasant
Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Lisa is a "weird girl" whose mother was killed the year before. Her dad remarries quickly and she's moved to a new town/school with a disapproving stepmother and an friendly but tactless step-sister. Lisa spends her time daydreaming in the old cemetery by her house, doting on a bachelor's grave. When lightening strikes the grave, he returns as a zombie, who she tries to help gain back his life and lost limbs, and he hopes to win her heart.
I wanted to love this, but I thought it was OK. The leads are good, including a great evil step-mother performance from Carla Gugino.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
A deaf mute man and his girlfriend kidnap the daughter of a businessman in order to pay for his sister's operation. The kidnapping goes wrong and the businessman and the kidnapper circle each other trying to get vengeance against the people who caused them harm.
This was a gritty crime drama more than a horror movie, but it's still pretty horrific. I liked it, but it was a rough watch. Doona Bae really shines as the wild communist girlfriend.
Doctor Sleep (2019)
Danny Torrance is all grown up and trying to cope with the aftermath of his experience at the Overlook hotel. He's locked away his demons (literal ghosts and figurative drinking problem) and is living a quiet small-town life. He gets a pen pal of sorts in Abra, a girl who shines even brighter than he did, writes him messages in a chalk board. She attracts the attention of Rose the Hat and her band of ghouls that live off the souls of people who shine, and Danny helps Abra fight them off.
I enjoyed this one a lot, it's not scary like "The Shining" but it does give a good sense of the macabre.
Finally, I'd like to mention my rewatch of Hellraiser: Inferno (2000).
Craig Sheffer (dude from Nightbreed) plays a puzzle-obsessed detective who has a lot of personal vices. He discovers the Lament Configuration puzzle box at a crime scene, so he is obsessed with it. He opens the box and his world promptly goes to shit.
This movie is compellingly terrible. It's clearly an unrelated supernatural noir script retrofitted with some Z-tier cenobites and Pinhead in a bit part. It's all confusing dream logic after he opens the box, which means nothing is real and nothing matters. It fails because the protagonist is a bad person, and doesn't give a reason to care what happens to him.
I was interested in seeing a few of those (the only one I've seen is Longlegs, because the Li'l Puppet is a Nic Cage and weird movie fan), so thanks, Mr. Reasons! Looks like I'll check out Doctor Sleep (heard mixed things, but as long as it's fun) and ... not much else.
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hide, witch, hide / the good folks come to burn thee / their keen enjoyment hid behind / a gothic mask of duty - P. Kantner
Re: Seen any crappy movies?
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