Tag: Horror

According to some people, there is only allowed to be one good horror movie a year. Something that is clearly leagues above the rest in terms of story, production value, acting, and whatever. Last year it was It Follows, the year before that The Babadook. In 2013 we had The Conjuring, and if I can plug my own favorite for 2012, I’d say Sinister.

Without watching The Witch, you can tell it is the type of movie that would love that distinction. Hell, it was a horror movie that played in festivals. That is a rarity.

It also very early in the year, most of the best films have come out in the second half (except for It Follows). All I can really say about 2016 before this movie is that it surely isn’t The Forest and it definitely isn’t The Final Project.

Creepy mood lighting: Perfect for scary hiding witches.

In the early 1600’s, America was a scary place. You lived on the plantation with other settlers, you did what you were told, you survived attacks from the natives, and you struggled to survive. To be banished would be akin to death. But for one family, they accepted banishment. The patriarch, William (Ralph Ineson), was a devoutly Christian man and he was upset with the plantation church. He disagreed with them on the book of God, and so he accepted the banishment because he knew the Lord would provide for his faithful family.

So he took his wife (Kate Dickie), oldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), slightly teenager son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and young twins Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson), on a cart into the world to find their new home.

Well after a few months they have a sizable farm. A house, a barn, some sheds. They have grown corn, have some goats and chickens and are surviving. Oh, and the wife gave birth to a baby boy, Samuel. Oh, but the corn crops have developed a rot and most of it isn’t edible. And while Thomasin was playing peek-a-boo with Samuel, Samuel disappeared. They can’t find him and assumed a wolf took him. But maybe it was something sinister? Maybe a witch?

These are only the first of their many problems. Distrust, poorness, hunger. And maybe a witch is causing tiny issues to grow their family apart. Maybe it is all just their own religious fears and puritan values causing the anger. But bad auras are afoot, and no one can save them now.

Also featuring Bathsheba Garnett and Sarah Stephens.

This is a scariest forest than the forest in The Forest.

The Witch was directed and written by Robert Eggers, a man who clearly loves his job. The level of realism in this movie is incredible. From the outfits, to the language, to their principals and actions, everything just seems to make sense. I didn’t find myself shaking my head, wondering why a character did something. No. They all have their reasons and make perfectly logical decisions for their character based on the events unfolding around them. It is fantastic.

You might be wondering if I am actually saying that this is a “horror” movie with great acting, and I totally am. They all sound like they have been speaking that dialect their entire life. Admittedly, the dialogue at times is hard to understand and I don’t pick up every important word. But the point is still made and that point is authentic as fuck.

I wouldn’t describe The Witch as the scariest movie ever, but it is definitely extremely unsettling and it feels downright evil. This is a slow burn horror film. You are frightened because you are living in a Puritan family’s world, facing their real fears and taking on the world as they see it. It is very religious based, and that type of horror can affect someone on the psychological level.

For those who aren’t familiar, one big aspect of the Puritan Christianity is they believed that when they were born, they were pre-selected for Heaven or Hell. Most people were selected for Hell and there is nothing they could do to change their outcome in life. Clearly those meant for Heaven would do great things, and everyone else would have faults and be bad. But they couldn’t help it. So succumbing to your fate and living in constant worry was just some of the many things you would do during this time period.

The witches they show in this film also feel authentic. Eggers based everything on this film on primary sources of the time and it just adds to the downright creepy realism. I should also add the score created great tension with heavy violin play, and allowed the audience to get frightened without any cheap jump scares.

The Witch is hard to watch, frightful, and it is clear that everyone involved put everything they had into it. It is the type of horror film I could see myself watching again and again, just needing a few months or years of downtime in between.

Go home 2016, this is probably the best horror film of the year and one of the best films of the year.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Why not a horror movie? The last time you watched something scary around this holiday was probably My Bloody Valentine, which at least makes sense somewhat thematically.

The Final Project probably picked its release date by throwing a dart at a calendar. It is a low budget, horror film, that is barely opening anywhere, but it is a real movie damn it. It knows it isn’t going to make bank the same weekend that Deadpool and Zoolander 2 comes out. But maybe it just wants to get those people who don’t like laughter or models and just want a good scare.

Not that The Final Project is promising to deliver a good scare. After all, it is another extremely cheaply done, hand held camera, no name actor, horror film that usually end up being pretty bad, but you never know. This might be the one to make money and be good.

Oh hey just a normal looking girl in the dark.

Movie begins with distorted figure, blurred and with a voice filter so his identity can be kept safe. Because he found this footage (making it officially found footage) and wants it out there. Yep.

This is about six students from University of Southern Louisiana in 2009, going to a haunted plantation in Vacherie, LA. It is important to note that there is no University of Southern Louisiana, so the fact that they are going for an actual realistic thing with the intro makes it quite annoying for them to mess up 10 seconds later.

The six students (Teal Haddock, Arin Jones, Sergio Suave, Leonardo Santaiti, Amber Erwin, Evan McLean) are doing this shitty documentary as a project for a class. The class was never explained, but the professor (Robert McCarley) doesn’t care. He assumes it will suck and he will still fail them, so hey, whatever.

Then they drive over there, people tell them to stay away, they don’t, and a whole lot of people die.

Oh shit she isn’t regular anymore!

Remember how they were going for realism? Well early on they made sure it was obvious of that, with the people talking not having their whole face in the frame, or people talking being blurred out.

Then something odd happened. During part of the van ride to the plantation, you can see all six students talking about dumb shit and playing Never Have I Ever. But none of them are holding the camera. There is literally a seventh person there, not talking and not supposed to be there holding the camera.

After a few scenes where this odd thing kept happening, we learn that there is a cameraman/engineer they also brought. Annoyingly, this was never said on camera until they already made it to the house halfway through the film roughly minute 40 of 75 minutes). The aspect of a camera man suddenly, after the first part of the film didn’t have one, just seems like a strange after though. Hell, the intro of the film mentioned that only six people went in to the house. They forgot there was actually seven.

It took 22 minutes before there was a scare. And it was someone screaming at the top of their lungs suddenly from a nightmare. If you like scares that consist of badly done “figures suddenly appearing” in the window, friends playing pranks, and the camera just going out allowing 85% of the very little action to not be in the film, then it is right up your ally.

On the audio front, it was all over the place. I had to constantly change my volume. It went back and forth. I had to lower the volume because it became too loud to understand, and then I couldn’t hear them talk/whisper and had to raise it back up. Very little sound work was done.

There are indie movies, and then there are things you make with your friends in the woods behind your house that you try and forget about years later. You don’t normally publish it and put it in theaters.

Is it over? Is it done? Is it dead?

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, besides having a lousy title, is supposed to be the last Paranormal Activity film. And it is in 3D! Huh, that is the same thing that Saw: The Final Cut did.

Frankly, I don’t buy it. These films are super easy to make, super cheap, and usually get a nice return on investment. There has to be more in the future, if not a completely “unrelated” plot with more security cameras. You know, just something.

Oh well, let’s hope this one resolves or answers some of the mysteries instead just creating a more confusing mythos.

Oh look the kid actors from Paranormal Activity 3. You know, the one that didn’t answer things and was a bullshit prequel. That’s a good sign.

The film opens up with a flashback to the end of the third film. The girls (Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown) are taken my some hidden entity and the old grandma to do fun culty things.

Flash forward to 2013. Emily (Brit Shaw) and Ryan (Chris J. Murray) are living in their house with their little girl, Leila (Ivy George). Well, Mike (Dan Gill) is coming to live with them for a couple weeks after leaving his long term girlfriend. He just needs a break.

So Ryan records it. He likes recording things I guess. Mundane shit like cleaning or decorating for Christmas. And during this, Mike finds a box that has an old weird looking camera in it with some VHS tapes. Weird. The tapes are mostly weird late at night entries of two young girls who seem to be aware they are being seen in the future.

But the weirdest thing is the camera itself. It is custom made and fancy, but also has some weird glimmers and shines when it is recording. Of course you’d think it is because it is 20 years old. But really it is seeing ghosts and Ryan just doesn’t realize it yet.

Until he does, and bad things start to happen and blah blah possessions demons end film.

Also featuring Michael Krawic and Olivia Taylor Dudley.

I don’t feel bad about spoiling the look of the ghost.

I almost sort of wish I could have seen the movie in 3D. Because honestly, I don’t understand the point at all. I don’t see what 3D could have done to enhance the movie, not even its shitty jump scares. I guess it enhanced maybe how much money it made, but that would be it.

This is the worst Paranormal Activity movie. Worse than 3 and 4. This is the truth the franchise is ending out on a shitty note.

First of all, the camera explanations were, by far, the worst they have ever been. The camera work early on was completely random and never justified. Once he found the weird camera? Sure, I can imagine trying to use it. But then to keep using it? To have that all lead up to needing cameras to observe over night? It was nonsensical.

Just like previous films, for the most part they never feel the need to look at the security footage the next day, and if they do, they never do anything about it outside of religious things. They don’t leave the house when things get scary, they are basically just asking for their daughter to get possessed.

Outside of the fact that some scary stuff happens on camera, this is basically nothing like a Paranormal Activity film. There is nothing subtle about the suspense. You see the “ghosts” early and often. Add on the videos of the girls from the past, you get some lame component seemingly try to emulate Sinister or V/H/S. Those videos are technically subdued, but they are also not scary whatsoever.

Ignore this horror. Let the franchise die with dignity. And yes, I am referring to Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.

The Aokigahara is a real place in Japan at one of the bases of Mt. Fuji. It is a dense “sea of trees” and is very beautiful. And very deadly.

People go to the Aokigahara to kill themselves. It is also nicknamed the Suicide Forest. It is so dense, you can only really hear the forest inside. It is easy to get lost if you go off the main path and there are associations of it with demons and ghosts in Japanese mythology. These demos convince people with sadness to end it all.

Not only that, but since it became known as a place that people go to kill themselves, obviously more people go there to do it. Some do it as a fad, some do it from regular Japanese stress levels. There could be any number of reasons, but now that it is known as a place to do it, well, can’t really stop it.

It is a cool place with a lot of history and a bit spooky. So of course, here is The Forest about white people going to Japan and getting all fucked up from the Aokigahara.

“Spook ghosts? Hello? Spook ghosts? Are you here? I’m losted. Halp pls.”

Jess Price (Natalie Dormer) is missing. She was teaching English in Tokyo, but apparently she went into the Aokigahara forest and hasn’t come out in 2 days. They assume it is suicide. But one person knows that it isn’t true. That is of course Sara Price (Natalie Dormer), her twin sister. The police won’t look for her, so it is up to her to drop everything and go to Tokyo to find her sister.

And well, it is tricky. Jess had suicide attempts in the past as she has always been the darker child. That comes from their youth, when their parents were hit by a drunk driver and Jess saw the bodies while Sara did not. So it wouldn’t be completely out of the question to assume that she did it. But the connection Sara still felt was there, so she assumed her sister was lost and needed help.

She is lucky though. She befriends an Australian journalist who works in Japan, Aiden (Taylor Kinney), and he has done a few stories on the forest. He knows it pretty well, but his friend, Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) knows it even better. Once or twice a week he hikes around the forest, doing a sort of Suicide Watch to help convince people that life is worth it, and they will take her out into the forest to help find Jess. And as a minor role, we have Eoin Macken as Sara’s husband, and Rina Takasaki as creepy girl in the forest.

But in the forest there are Yurei, vengeful spirits, and they will trick people into doing bad things. They will show them things that are not real. They will make them see lies and have them end their lives without them even realizing it. But as long as they stick together they should be good.

Oh fuck.

I am not one who believes in cultural appropriation or anything like that, but I do question the story they chose to tell for this tale. Bringing in a white outsider to tell the story, instead of just, you know, Japanese people feels like a lame attempt to allow dialogue to explain the forest. Having the main person who helps her also be a white guy? Well, that is just down right movie magic convenient. But whatever. That was only a minor annoyance.

The bigger annoyances come from our main character. I am not saying a character has to be likable for us to enjoy a movie, but there has to be a reason for us to care about her story. And she isn’t likable. She is the normal one, but she is brash, arrogant and stubborn. She makes a series of terrible decisions and literally ignores every knowledgeable characters advice about what to do or not to do in the forest. It makes the viewer just want her to die. But the viewer doesn’t want to watch her to die, they just want her to hurry up and die, to end the movie so everyone can go home and do something else with our time.

Related, Kinney plays an Australian living in Tokyo? I am sure his Japanese was fine, but they didn’t even bother giving him any accent. Calling him Australian is extremely pointless in this regard, as he played an American and no one seemed to care.

The Aokigahara is a great place for horror films to take place but this horror movie doesn’t do it justice. It is cheap, the plot is predictable, and the ending ends like all bad horror movies. Erm. Badly.

I feel strange reviewing Goosebumps in the month of December. THAT’S NOT THE RIGHT THEME.

Well, I had to cancel my eventual trip to see Goosebumps in theaters back end of October. Things were crazy. And now things are crazy, but a bit less. So while some people are thinking of Star Wars or Christmas, I can think about scaring little kids.

After all, what are the holidays, if not for scaring little kids?

Back to the film, I read probably 75% of the main Goosebumps books when I was a youthful lad, and I watched every episode of the TV Show. Hell, I’ve been watching the episodes on Netflix slowly for the past two years. It is great to see how shitty the effects are now, but how much they scare the kids. And occasionally you get to see Ryan Gosling out of nowhere, so that was fun.

Needless to say, I was nostalgia-ing pretty hard, so I couldn’t wait to see what weirdness they went with for the new film.

A whole lot of white people. Makes sense.

Zach (Dylan Minnette) and his mom (Amy Ryan) are moving to the best place to be a kid. Discovery Zone! Wait no. He is actually now in Madison, Delaware.

New school, new high school life. And a crazy aunt (Jillian Bell) who is way too energetic also now nearby. What’s not to love?

Oh hey, his neighbor is a teenage girl. That’s a plus. Because he is a boy and boys like girls. Hannah (Odeya Rush) is homeschooled and her dad (Jack Black) is very protective and won’t let Zach interact with her. Fuck.

Let’s cut to the chase. The dad is totally R. L. Stine. Yes the “real one” who wrote all the Goosebumps books. And he has original manuscripts of all of his books in the house locked up. What’s that? If they open it up, the bad creature comes out! Holy fuck, shenanigans! Magic and stuff! And eventually Slappy, the doll is released (also voiced by Jack Black), and he decides he should open all the books around town, burn them so they cannot be recaptured and fuck all the shit up. Because Stine wasn’t letting them wreck things. Fuck that small town up, hard.

Also with Ryan Lee as the weird male friend and Ken Marino as creepy gym teacher.

All these monsters and the scariest one is still the clown.

Okay, without taking off the nostalgia glasses, I can say I was a bit disappointed. Especially when “all” of the books are unleashed upon the town into one big army, my main thought was “Yes! Let’s see all the other bad guys! Even the lame ones!” But no, they added only a handful of villains, with mostly zombie hordes to make it look bigger. So I was disappointed I didn’t get to see more Goosebumps staples. I am mostly shocked I didn’t see a haunted camera and there was only a vague reference to a mask. Bring out the props, damn it!

Nostalgia glasses back off. On its own, the film felt relatively safe. It had a few in jokes for adults more aware of the series that would fly over the heads of new kids. Hell, there was an R. L. Stine cameo that I found incredibly hilarious and well placed. But for the most part, nothing too crazy or unexpected happened. The main character was generic.

There were still a few good scenes though. The abominable snowman in the hockey arena was very tense. The first lawn gnomes attack was great. And I enjoyed the shocker and the werewolf. Slappy makes since as the big bad guy, only in that he has a voice, but he didn’t do enough creepy things on his own.

I will say this. When the first trailer released, I made a guess on a twist that would happen near the end of the film, and I ended up being correct. It is something that avid Goosebump readers might also have figured out before the movie, due to book plot lines and character names. It was just one of those tidbits that just popped in my head, seemingly out of nowhere. So once the twist occurred, it didn’t land too strongly.

As I was saying. Perfect Christmas film.

Westerns! According to Spielberg, Super Hero movies might soon go the way of the Western. Everywhere, and then rarely. K, thanks Spielberg.

All of this is irrelevant to Bone Tomahawk, which is a new western (definitely not a super hero movie). It was also independently released, you can tell, because it wasn’t even rated. Ooh, a Non Rated Western? That has to be intentional. There has to be some fucked up shit in there. You know, NC-17 rated stuff.

What will it be? Violence? Sex? The word “Cunt?” Who knows! Only the one with the best facial hair I imagine.

Fuck. I hope that is real and I hope all future movies let him keep it.

Set in the vague past, we need to talk about a small town out in the West with your standard group of people. We have Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell), whom has lived a good life of protectin’ people and growing facial hair. He has a “Back Up Deputy”, Chicory (Richard Jenkins, who I didn’t recognize at all until writing this review), and older fella who likes to talk. Like old people.

They got a rich guy, John Brooder (Matthew Fox) with no family, a fear of Indians, and a lover of the ladies in the town. Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson) is also relatively wealthy, but he has a broken leg, and is being tended by mostly from his wife, Samantha (Lili Simmons), who is basically a nurse.

But when a drifter (David Arquette) comes to their town, their life begins to get a bit rougher. They lock him in the local jail, not sure if they should trust him. Next thing they know, the drifter, Samantha, and Nick (Evan Jonigkeit) are missing. Apparently they were taken by an angry Indian tribe, nicknamed the Troglodytes, because they live in caves. No other tribes will interact with them because of their cruelty and cannibalism.

Well, not in Hunt’s town. He is able to gather a crew of men (the four mentioned!) to get them back, despite injuries and oldness. That is the only thing they can do, lest a wife and a friend get eaten up. That is not a pleasant way to go.

Also with one scene from Sid Haig.

There are rag tag groups, and then there is this group. Rejectag.

Bone Tomahawk is like a slow fuse. A long, slow fuse. Bone Tomahawk is 132 minutes long and the type of film that is in desperate need of a better editor. I can imagine at least 20 minutes of material being cut out to make the story just a smoother experience for everyone involved. I am not talking 20 minutes of beautiful scenic shots, I just mean actual character conversations.

The first scene is great, tense, gets you the mood. Then it takes a long time before people get kidnapped and their journey begins. An incredibly long time. Enough time for me to forget about the intro completely.

The journey itself was fine. The four actors provided nice conversations and good back stories, but still I figured more things would happen outside of the one or two issues they encountered pre-Troglodytes.

The action was very brutal however. A lot a talk about how one death scene was the craziest of the year, and I think most everyone who watches it will feel uncomfortable throughout it. Straight up medieval torture. The other shootouts are not long and drawn out, just real people blasting in holes in people where no one can really be a hero.

Bone Tomahawk could have been an excellent western. It just needs to trim a lot of fat first to get ready for bikini season.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Did you know that being a movie reviewer could be quite hard? It is. Sure, you think it is just putting on a movie and watching it. But to be the very best (like no one ever was) you have to watch them all. The good. The bad. The grotesque.

I am happy to say that in a little over 4 years, I am now reviewing my 1500th movie. That is right. A Milestone Review. 23 months ago, almost exactly was when I reviewed my biggest milestone, my 1000th review. That was of course The Human Centipede.

I tell the story of why it took so long, and honestly, the delay for The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is similar. I don’t want to watch this. I know I had to someday. Might as well save it for a special occasion. And hey, in 500 more reviews I think you know what we will get for that review.

I tried to make sure the pictures weren’t completely inappropriate. Only one of them kind of is.

Or for some of you, all of these are inappropriate.

In this sequel, The Human Centipede is just a movie. That means the sequel is set “in the real world” instead of the world of fiction. And in the real world, things are much more nasty.

Our star (?) is a man named Martin (Laurence R. Harvey). Martin, as you can imagine, has a lot of problems. He was sexually abused as a kid by his dad, and now his mom (Vivien Bridson) hates him for getting him locked up. He is over weight, sees a shitty psychiatrist (Bill Hutchens), has his own pet centipede, and of course, is obsessed with The Human Centipede.

I think it is in black and white for the censors to allow the movie to exist.

His only responsibility is a security guard job where he sits in a booth and stares at video of people in a parking deck. Yes, the parking deck security guard is the lowest form of security guard, but it is necessary. He also ends up watching the movie over and over. He might get off on it. And you know my might is not even a guess. Some sick shit happens in that booth.

But not as sick as his book, that he is writing. He is watching the movie constantly to learn from it. He wants to make his own human centipede. But not with only 3 shitty people. No. He wants 12.

He is anti-social though. He doesn’t even know 12 people. He needs strangers.

The other issue with Martin is that he is not a trained surgeon. He doesn’t know how to operate on people, to attach them to one another or anything. Well, not in a real science or sanitary way.

He has to use basic tools. Even if he did know how to do it the right way, it would take so much time to make the 11 connections that most likely parts of the centipede would be dead before he could even finish. And that would be sad and awkward. More sad and awkward than the human centipede in general.

I don’t think playing the “what is more awkward” game makes a lot of sense in this movie.

Good news! He is also obsessed with the real life actors who played in the movie! Like Ashlynn Yennie, our starlet who survived the first film. Well, this sneaky guy Martin somehow pretends to also be a casting studio. He offers all three members of the centipede to audition for the new “Tarantino movie”. Unfortunately, Yennie’s agent is the only one to take up the offer and she shows up all happy. But now the “Real life” Yennie gets to be part of a centipede as well.

Some nice layers to this movie. You can tell they had the best writers working on it all.

This is all Martin. CGI free and ready to party.

Who are our lucky victims? Well they are played by Emma Lock, Maddi Black, Kandice Caine, Dominic Borrelli, Lucas Hansen, Lee Nicholas Harris, Dan Burman, Daniel Jude Gennis, and Georgia Goodrick,

Some of these people are dicks. Some are just party chicks. Some were prostitutes and cab drivers. Some are noble family people. But all of them are people who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and Martin took the first people he could get his hands on. Even if they had a kid in the back seat.

Martin knows party tricks as well!

I feel like I am stalling. I totally am. Dude hits everyone over the head with a crowbar. All the time. Apparently that knocks them out. This is the most unrealistic part of the movie. There should be a lot more dead people.

Anyways. Martin flips his shit. His mom wants him dead for the reasons listed above. She angers their skinhead neighbors and tells them it was his idea, just so they can rough him up and kick his ass. Eventually he retaliates against her and obvious shit happens. This causes him to finally go through with his plan to put the 12 humans together.

Warning, the next photo is my one “graphic” photo. But the calmest one I could find. I needed one.

AHHH CENTIPEDES SO GROSS.

Anyways, he puts them together. Some people die before he can attach them, so he doesn’t get to put all 12 together. That is a shame.

He gets to have his centipede though and it gets him super excited. VERY EXCITED. If you graphically understand my meaning. It is very bad for the last person in line, that is for sure. And I will say it was one of the two most disturbing things about this movie.

Unfortunately, it was followed up immediately after by an even more disturbing scene. One that made no sense and literally had me going “WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK” out loud, despite watching it alone.

Needless to say, after these two terrible scenes, people in the centipede start to fight back. One guy in particular breaks his head free from its confines, breaking the centipede in half. This, along with other events and voice mails, makes Martin very upset. He snaps even more than he did before and well, a lot of people then start to die. Mercy killing really at that point.

Yay gross shit. Literally.

You don’t want to know you don’t want to know you don’t want to know.

Normally I try to keep these milestone reviews extra funny and extra spoiler-y. No details needs to be ignored.

I kind of failed on both points with this big one. It is hard to make great jokes when you are so appalled. It is hard to spoil the worst things when you want to scrape them from your brain, not type out descriptions making it more real.

The first film may have tried to make a creepy horror along with a few gross scenes. This one went full on yuckville. It only wanted to make disturbing scenes. Scenes that would ban it from a few countries. Scenes that would make you want to turn it off.

When I watched The Green Inferno, I paused it frequently due to some very graphic scenes because I couldn’t take it. However, this time I never paused the movie. I just needed it to get over with and didn’t want a pause to make the overall experience that much longer.

This film is so nasty though and that is all I can talk about. It really shouldn’t have been made. Yes, it accomplished its goal. But at what cost, film makers? Your director was so preoccupied with whether or not he could, he didn’t stop to think if he should.

Don’t watch this movie. And I have to watch the third one. I don’t know if it is worse, I just know the centipede is longer and it is a prison or something.

“Final Girl” is a term given to the last surviving female in a horror movie. This woman may have been in danger the whole movie. But somehow by the end she has enough gumption to slay the killer, or escape the building, or whatever. Hell, Ripley is a Final Girl.

Enough horror film had this happen for it to become a trope at least. I actually never heard about it until this year. Not just because of the movie The Final Girls that I am about to review, but because there was another movie also out aroudn the same time called…Final Girl. Yeah. It is pretty damn easy to get these ones confused. I haven’t seen such close titles for real unrelated movies since A Late Quartet and Quartet.

Now I will see Final Girl, some day. I have to given how easily it is to mistake The Final Girls. But to make matters even more confusing, they also share an actor. Somehow, Alexander Ludwig decided it’d be a good idea to be a lead in both films.

With an amazing shocked face like that, there’s no question how he landed the roles either.

Amanda Cartwright (Malin Akerman) was in a series of horror films back in the day, but now she is just struggling to find a job. All people remember her for is her role in Camp Bloodbath, now a cult classic, but a movie she doesn’t like too much. But this isn’t her story. You know, because she dies in a car crash early on in the film. Her daughter, Max (Taissa Farmiga) was also in the car but she survived.

Since then, life has been lame. Her best friends brother, Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), has apparently promised that Max would show up to a special screening of Camp Bloodbath. She agrees, reluctantly, as long as her friend, Gertie (Alia Shawkat) comes along. Chriss (Alexander Ludwig), a male friend who is totally into her, also comes along, which means the local bitch, Vicki (Nina Dobrev), who used to date him tags along as well.

And since this is hard to explain, I will be succinct: Some shit went down, and now they are trapped in the movie. Good news: Max can reunite with a version of her mother, that’s cool! Bad news: a masked man is trying to kill them all! But now that they are in the movie, it is harder to predict what would happen. Their mere presence changes the plot line for good, so they can’t rely on their movie knowledge to win this one.

Other campers are played by the likes of Adam DeVine, Angela Trimbur, Chloe Bridges, and Tory N. Thompson.

Honestly the only thing you need to be good at in a horror movie is your scared face.

Remember Cabin In The Woods? That was a genre bending, horror comedy that a lot of people didn’t know how to react to, but has eventually been accepted as a great and unique film. Cabin in the Woods is hard to define. The Final Girls is not hard to define, because I can look at it and say “It is like, Cabin in the Woods, kind of!”

A comedy horror means two things: It is usually funny, and it is usually not at all scary. They all just become parodies of horror without the fear behind it and this is honestly no exception. There are maybe “scary” moments, sure, but no one watching it will find it scary as per the norm.

Instead, The Final Girls should be judged on its comedy and it should be valued highly. Witty and fun, the cast of characters, and movie character stereotypes allow a lot of good deaths that follow and exploit common horror tropes. This is a PG-13 movie, which I feel limits some of the extremes they could have gone to, which is a shame. But the final fight scene felt nicely epic, some of the deaths were pretty creative, and the constant allusions that they were in a movie and not just a strange story were a very nice touch.

Overall, The Final Girls is a pretty good movie experience, and I hope they don’t mess it up with sequels. Hell, I like Alexander Ludwig now, and that is after I also saw When The Game Stands Tall.

I have not seen a lot of actual horror films made by Eli Roth. He is supposed to be a big name, but when I looked at his directed list I had seen…well, zero. I thought he had directed Aftershock, but I was wrong about that.

But I am sure I will watch Knock Knock at some point! That is some sort of Thriller and it is on VOD exactly when it was supposed to be. Apparently The Green Inferno was not as lucky. Made in 2013, it was supposed to come out in 2014, but shit hit the fan, and it got delayed over a year. Which is why Eli Roth even has two movies coming out only roughly a month apart.

Speaking of intro small talk, the film was clearly inspired by Cannibal Holocaust. That is a film from the 1980’s which introduced found footage before it was even a thing. It was very gruesome, realistic, and basically the same plot of some white people heading to the rain forest to get eaten. In fact, people insisted at the time that it must have been a snuff film! The title itself was the name of the movie that was being made in Cannibal Holocaust.

“Ooooh hair, my favorite.”

Being an activist in college is one of the easiest things to do with your free time. Once you walk through a quad or a pit or a hallway, you will find dozens of protests happening all around you. Every day. Guaranteed. All you have to do is stand around, do a chant, and maybe (maybe!) hold a sign.

Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is just a bright eyed and bushy tailed freshmen in NYC. She gets interested in the activism, but her roommate (Sky Ferreira) thinks the local group on campus is too crazy. They plan to go to Peru! There is a logging company who is illegally taking out trees and threatening to remove local tribes from their homes! They will dress up like loggers, tie themselves to trees and record their actions straight onto the internet. That should stop them from hurting them and get people to care about their group and hate on the one company. Sweet. That goes fine enough. Outside of spoiler stuff.

The real issue occurs when they drive to leave the jungle. Something goes wrong with their plane, killing half of the crew as it crash lands back into the jungle. This is where they are quickly found by the local friendly natives. Just kidding, they are all painted red and totally scary. They tranq those college students and capture them to bring them back to their village.

And guess what? You already know what. They eat people! Yay!

Now they have to figure out how to survive the tribe, run away, survive in the jungle, and get back to America as soon as they can. And guess what, again! They ruined their best chance of escape by making the logging company stop their illegal actions. Life is a bitch some times.

Starring Ramon Llao and Antonieta Pari as the main two village people. As for our other activists, we have Aaron Burns, Nicolas Martinez, Magda Apanowicz, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, and Ariel Levy as our leader.

“What? Tribal mom got your tongue?”

I have heard some of Roth’s movies have been very graphic and hard to watch. Why the fuck would I ever want to go back and watch Hostel if that is true? The first major torture porn right, outside of some Saw movies? Well, The Green Inferno, if you didn’t already guess it, was very graphic and hard to watch.

I had to look away numerous times throughout the movie, my stomach unwilling to negotiate with the eye terrorists on the screen. Eating people it turns out can be pretty gross. Unfortunate, if everyone was simply just eaten, that’d be a boring and just gross film. They do a good job of keeping more of the deaths diverse so that it doesn’t get stagnant. Although watching that boy from the Spy Kid movies felt very weird for me.

As a horror film, it did its job in terms of grossing/creeping out the viewer. It definitely isn’t boring, outside of some of the earlier moments before they make it to the other country. It is super violent and should make you uncomfortable.

But it feels all very cheap at the same time. Overall the film lacks a lot of substance. It is trying to make a statement about social justice types, or America butting into things, or…something else. It just does it in a terrible way. “Don’t do this, or you will get eaten by the natives.” Cultural exploitation aside (which I do not care about), it isn’t a strong link and ruins any message it was trying to make.

For those who like gross stuff, this is your movie. If you want anything besides that, well…uh, not this movie then.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Insidious: Chapter 3? CHAPTER 3? This is why we can’t have nice horror movies in America. Gotta fucking franchise everything.

James Wan has even gone down this road before. He directed Saw and watched it drivel into a sorry state of a franchise. He did The Conjuring, which was great, and that followed up by a terrible Annabelle from someone else. This franchise from the first to Chapter 2, I have always found it just okay, but at least he directed the sequel. He didn’t let someone Saw the fuck out of it.

Until now. Now it is directed by his writing friend, Leigh Whannell. So Wan hasn’t completely abandoned it for the super hero films he is now directing, but it is still just another film series that doesn’t need any new material.

What made the news of this sequel even more disappointing was finding out that it was a prequel. Prequels sound great because they can answer questions directly that might have been brought up about the past. But Paranormal Activity 3 tried to do this method and all it did was waste our times and actually answer close to nothing.

Good. A new face to the franchise who won’t affect anything at all.

Hey, that new face has a name. Quinn (Stefanie Scott)! And she has an issue. Her mom died awhile ago and now she thinks her mom might be trying to contact her. She tried the normal methods of contact and nothing worked.

So she found herself on the door steps of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). She heard she was a powerful psychic who could talk to those in the afterlife. But an accident in Elise’s life had her retire, vowing to never do it again. But eh, the plot has to move along some how, so she does it anyways. Elise doesn’t like what she sees, so she tells Quinn to never try to contact her mom again.

And guess what? Now Quinn and Elise have a demon fucking with them. It gets worse when Quinn gets hit by a car, breaking her legs. Now she has to rely on her dad (Dermot Mulroney) and younger brother (Tate BerneyT) to take care of her. She has a bell to ring when she needs help, a nice sudden sound making device to make things extra creepy.

This film also shows where Elise meets Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell), who of course you would recognize from the previous, set in the future, movies.

When jumping around the time domain, sometimes colors get all sorts of fucky.

What does one do with a drunken franchise, early in the morning? That is the only way I know how to describe Insidious, as its movies attempt to give us something deep but end up just stumbling around all the place, slurring their words, and personally thinking they are the best. The first two films ended up being weird, with a couple of random scares. In Chapter 3, we got the prequel that no one wanted. Did we need to see how Elise and her goons met? No. No we did not. Now, it also alluded that shit went wrong for her in the past, and thankfully they answered that question through dealing with demons in this film. But why not have an actually younger Elise, facing that problem head on before she retired from psychic shit? Actually change up how we see the character?

Instead this film takes place, I don’t know, a year or something before Insidious. If you were reading this as a book, it would be a confusing placement to throw in a flashback chapter for people who have been supporting (albeit important) characters.

Unfortunately, this film is also the weakest of the three in terms of plots and actual scares. It stars a family that I end up feeling nothing for, despite their hardships, because it isn’t the same characters as the first two films. There is no Chapter 4 currently planned, but the director/writer/costar said that if it was, he would probably place it after 3 in the plotline, but before the first. That would officially just turn this series into “Elise and the Boys Para-normally battling demons!” That is fine, but to me that clearly just makes 3 and 4 spin-off films, and it is kind of shit that they are just calling it Insidious.

Most of this review is just arguing semantics. That aside, I didn’t like the film, and thought it was a boring side story from an already meh series.