Tag: Horror

It turns out there are more than just popular wide released horrors happening this year. Yes, they are the ones we all hear about and have been mostly disappointing. But there is indie stuff out there, and the indie stuff ends up being the best.

You know, like The Babadook, It Follows, and Goodnight Mommy. All from this year or last year. So when I found out about The Boy I decided to wait a couple of months to make sure I could review this around Halloween instead. That’s the level of dedication we provide here at Gorgon Reviews. Delaying reviews to fit silly little themes.

The only worry with indie horrors is that sometimes they can go a bit too slow. Usually they build up for an amazing payoff, but if the journey isn’t worth it, then payout be damned, no one will care.

As long as the movie has a good early hook, the rest should be fine.

Life as an only child can be boring. Especially if you live in a small town. Wait. No. Near a small town. You actually live in a hotel by a small mountain highway road. Sometimes people stay there, but usually it is dead and boring as shit.

It doesn’t get any worse for Ted (Jared Breeze). His mom left some years ago with a client who stayed in their hotel frequently, leaving just his dad (David Morse), an empty shell of a man. So he just works in the hotel and finds things to do with his time. Some of these things are bad or questionable, but since he is alone so often, who will care?

Sure people still do occasionally come to the hotel. Like William Colby (Rainn Wilson), who just so happens to get into a crash right outside the hotel and, being a secretive man, doesn’t want to go to the hospital to rest. Or that other family with the little boy, who after staying a night, find that their car no longer works.

Man. Both of those things sure are strange. I hope Ted isn’t behind all of this and, if so, I hope he doesn’t do anything worse.

I, uhh. I got nothing.

As expected, The Boy, like a lot of indie films of this genre, had a slow built up, all culminating towards a huge ending. So, starting from the end, I can say man, that shit was crazy. Imagine me making a gang pose while I said that. Maybe even while covering my mouth and saying “Ohhhh.” It had some very intense moments and the use of visuals and music were excellent with it.

And throughout the film, there were several moments of teetering on evil and not so evil, so that I never really knew when, if, and how often he would snap. They filled their purpose and had me worried.

However, this film is far better defined as a Drama Thriller, not a horror. I would argue a lot of the film is slow and harder to get through (/easier to zone out during). There already wasn’t a large cast of characters, but the mystery about Wilson’s character really started to make me feel indifferent. I no longer cared about the pay out, and started looking for other plot lines to get me interested.

The Boy is not the film for everyone. But if the director turns it into a trilogy (source: another reviewer audibly telling me), then it might have some better moments in the future.

Ah, horror remakes. We need at least one a year right? We’ve had Carrie, Evil Dead, Fright Night, and many more. It is easy and hip and cool to do. Hell, I know it sounds like I wrote that like a sarcastic asshat, but for those three films in particular I ended up liking them or thinking they were okay enough as a remake. I didn’t hate any of them.

Then Poltergeist flashed its way onto our screens like a lightning bolt. “Not so fast, mother fucker!” it clamored through the speaker box.

I may be jumping the gun with the review, but Poltergeist decided that instead of making a nice modern update with its remake, it would instead just…take more of the same elements from the original, cut out a lot of the horror bits, and instead turn it into more of a Sci-Fi Thriller. Yeah. Fuck the original, right?

And always fuck clowns, obviously. As long as its consensual and not Vulgar.

Big day for the Bowen family! They just got a new house. And hey, it is really low because of the stagnant market. Definitely not because no one would buy it. And it doesn’t have many neighbors. Who cares. They can afford it, which is the most important thing in this economy. They don’t have much of an income right now. The dad, Eric (Sam Rockwell), insists that his wife, Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) not have to go back to work, because they can totally get through this without that. So yeah, Eric is kind of a dick.

Either way, they have their three kids, Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), Griffin (Kyle Catlett), and Madison (Kennedi Clements), in order of oldest to youngest. Kendra is DGAF oldest sister, so you can ignore her. Madison is the one who starts saying things and talking to entities in her room alone. Griffin is the only one who believes that something weird is happening.

Either way, outside of funky static TV stuff, other electronics are also acting wonky. It turns out that this house used to be built on an Indian Burial site. That was decades ago (Oh man, is this technically a sequel!?). But weird stuff happened and people got angry, so they had to pay a settlment, I think, and agreed to move the graveyard to a different location. Well, then why the fuck are spirits still angry? Why are they somehow bring the barrier between worlds and stealing their youngest daughter?

Also featuring Jane Adams— and Jared Harris.

Maybe this is a metaphor for letting the TV be your nanny?

Poltergeist has about three scary moments in it. Maybe. Calling it a horror film almost feels ludicrious. It has a lot of other things though!

It has a lot of zero character growth. Rockwell’s character is completely cardboard. A completely unrealistic person given anything that happens in the movie, and even more sadly, he doesn’t even dance. The mom and older daughter role are almost completely unimportant.

It is all about little boy and little girl. And occasionally some adult comes around and does something, but when the girl gets sucked away (for a majority of the film I guess), it is mostly up to Catlett to keep us entertained. He does an okay job, in terms of kid stuff. But he cannot save this boring mess of a film.

That’s right. The biggest shame of this remake is not that it isn’t scary, it is the boringness of it all. It honestly feels like they went so light and fluffy with the whole thing that they wanted it to actually be a PG horror film. It was hard to get through because of how uninteresting it became after only 15 or so minutes.

What’s that? Oh, it’s October! That means we are supposed to be getting a lot of horror movies, right? Where the fuck are they?

Oh, there are some horror comedies, and a lot of horrors from the summer are coming out on DVD. But not a whole lot in October, because the studio people hate us. The last few Octobers have been mostly shit as well.

So thank goodness, early October, we have the chance of something wonderful. We have Crimson Peak, directed by my man, Guillermo del Toro. That man loves scary stuff. Sure he is some times hit or miss with his work, but damn it, he at least has the passion enough for me to trust his work and not judge it from crappy trailers.

I haven’t reviewed a single horror film all month (Goodnight Mommy I did in September!), so hopefully Crimson Peak gets me on the right foot and scares the Hellboy out of me.

Oh no! It looks like those bricks are covered with the remains of Hellboy 3!

Traveling back about a hundred years, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) believes in ghosts. Her mom died when she was a child, and one very frightful night, her ghost visited her and warned her about Crimson Peak. Of course it was just childish nonsense. Now, she is an adult and living with her father (Jim Beaver), in a nice Buffalo mansion. She considers herself to be an author, but not stupid romance, instead nice dramas and ghost stories even. In reality, it is hard to define her work by a single genre.

Her dad wants her to be set up with a local boy, an eye doctor, Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam). But Edith is a bit more interested in a stranger to their town, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). He came for a loan. His families business is in ruins, collecting red clay for bricks below their mansion. He has made a device to help dig it out, but he just needs capital to get the working parts in order.

Needless to say, he didn’t expect to find love in Buffalo. Thomas and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are a bit weird, but their family has been through rough times, so it makes sense. Eventually, after some circumstances, Edith finds herself whisked away to Great Britain to live in their home. A deteriorating building with a lot of quirks due to its location.

And you know. Some ghosts maybe. Some really creepy shit. And a whole lot of secrets.

Special shout out to Burn Gorman, who played a small role as a Private Investigator. I normally just say “also featuring” but I enjoyed his 3 scenes a lot more than just a “featuring” line.

Shit Lucille, you need to clean that mirror or something.

Crimson Peak is like an old timey horror movie, in almost every way. It isn’t your modern horror film that cares about the number of jump scares it can fill in and how many people they can kill by the end. In fact, the plot itself as it unravels won’t feel new. There are elements taken from other stories that sure, may have done it better originally.

But Crimson Peak excels in the areas that the older styled movies had no chance in. First of all, HOLY FUCK, this is a pretty movie. The use of contrasting colors is so heavily used that it almost feels like the entire set was made by a darker Wes Anderson. The oozing red clay splattered around the mansion (that yes, looks like blood), does a great job of constantly enforcing the mood and history of the house. The snow, the green and blue hued windows. It is all so damn beautiful.

I wasn’t aware the movie was being release on IMAX, which unsettled me, as it would make it harder for me to cover my eyes if the screen was that much bigger than normal. Thankfully, the attention to detail that del Toro is known for when it comes to set design shined so well on the giant screen.

You know what else the older movies didn’t have? Jessica Fucking Chastain. I can admit that Chastain is a good actress, but I never really thought she was great. She was good in a lot of recent movies, including The Martian, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, A Most Violent Year, Interstellar, and sure, Zero Dark Thirty. Honestly though, they never seemed to push her into the excellence category. It just took a Drama/Horror/Fantasy for me really respect her. She went so hardcore into her character, by the end I couldn’t believe that someone who generally plays such quiet characters could be pulling it off.

The actors are of course good to fine in their own ways, all playing their roles wonderfully. But Chastain stole the damn show.

Crimson Peak will be frightening at only some points, strangely graphic at other parts (involving insects!), but for the most part, del Toro just wanted to tell a romance/drama story. Sort of. This is only slightly a horror, so those who are expecting a lot more in the scream department will be disappointed. In this film, there just happens to be ghosts and dead bodies along the way.

Circle Circle. Dot Dot. Everyone knows that is what you need to get your cootie shot. Except for my wife, who asked why I drew boobs on her arm.

No one wants Cooties. They are gross and carried by other gross kids. Fuck those asshats, trying to spread their germs on you. Or worse, COOTIES.

When I heard they were making a horror comedy about actual cooties and how the outbreak starts, I will admit I was interested. Zombie movies are trying very hard to be original now, so why not make a whole lot of kid zombies? That adds a new dynamic, morally and comedically, with lots of room for potential. It makes sense, if you think about it. Kids in general have potential, so Zombie Kids should have potential as well!

Although, with their shorter arms the whole thing just might be child’s play.

Clint (Elijah Wood) is a fancy book author who used to live in NYC. But times are tough, and he is living with his mother. It is the start of summer and he has lucked his way into a summer school teaching gig, as a substitute. Anything to pass the time, I guess. If anything it can get him out of his slump. He is trying to write a horror book about a possessed boat and he is only about a chapter in.

Needless to say, the kids at summer school are kind of dicks. But at least the teachers are mostly not dicks.

Well, Wade (Rainn Wilson), the athletic director is a dick. But everyone else is eccentric or fine. Oh hey, there is Lucy (Alison Pill), who he went to school with. She seems relatively normal.

Other teachers include people played by Jack McBrayer, Nasim Pedrad, and Leigh Whannell. And let’s not forget the crosswalk guard Jorge Garcia and the janitor Peter Kwong!

Anyways. Some sort of infected chicken nugget causes it all. Girl eats it, starts getting sick. She bites another kid, and soon, kids are running around the school, biting and attacking anyone in site. Fucking kid zombies.

As for some of the kids, we had Patriot (Cooper Roth), the biggest dick in the school, Dink (Miles Elliot), his lackie, Tamra (Morgan Lily), patient zero, and Calvin (Armani Jackson), a kid who didn’t get bit and gets to hang out with the adults! There was another girl that hung out with them, but I forget a name. And of course, Ian Brennan as the normally vice principal, but for summer, principal! He wrote the narrator of Glee.

Here’s what you missed last time on Cooties: Fuck these little fuckers!

Cooties ended up being a lot more graphic and violent than I expected. Horror Comedy usually means a lot more comedy and horror is more of a sub genre. Like, “Oh yeah, there are zombies, so there is a horror element, but we are all just hear for the laughs.” No, the zombie kids end up being a bit scary and definitely very gruesome in their attacks on the teachers and parents at Fort Chicken. Add in the booming loud noises department and I was constantly taken aback. Yes, they made loud noises to scare you, and yes, that is lame. But they were still unexpected.

I actually had a mostly enjoyable time with this film. The banter in particular between Wood and Wilson was the highlight of the film, along with one of the teachers being ridiculously smart in biology out of nowhere. A lot of it however falls apart with the ending. They just don’t stick it. It is as if the writer/director didn’t know where to take the story. With only 10 or so minutes left, our characters were in a new situation. No real time to fully appreciate the situation, just enough time to showcase something cool and end with a cliffhanger.

The movie is also afraid to kill off the teachers. Anyone who seems to have lines is encased with plot armor. The kids lose any real scare when they turn into just things that run at them just as doors are closing. At least early on there was mass chaos, kids chasing other kids, teachers getting fucked over who were outside, etc.

Despite everything, Cooties was entertaining in ways I didn’t expect, and pretty decent on the joke department. I would watch a sequel in the future, should it happen, with some amount of optimism. But in all honesty, despite unresolved story lines, I don’t think a sequel has anywhere it could go that would set it apart from other zombie films.

“You know what your website needs?” I hear these words all the time. People offering suggestions for genres, or movies to review. I like suggestions, so this is great. “Your website needs more horror films from other countries.” Well, that is a very specific request. But let’s do it.

Now the person who requested that most likely meant something Asian. They have a lot of crazy scary horror films, if I am to believe my friends. Since I am afraid of scary things, I never really jumped into that subset. So instead, let’s take it slow and dive into European Horror. Specifically, Austrian.

Oh hey, look at that. Austria’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in the next Oscars is actually a horror movie! That means it is either really good, or Austrian cinema is really lacking.

That is why I am looking at Goodnight Mommy, or, Ich Seh, Ich Seh (which of course does not mean Goodnight Mommy in German). I assume the name change in English is because they didn’t want their film compared to Foghorn Leghorn.

“Ah see, I see, sons, why are you wearing those masks?” – Foghorn Leghorn playing the mother.

Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) are twins, let’s say 11, living in a secluded and rich house in the Austrian countryside. There are farms nearby, woods, a lake, some caves, everything they could want. And eventually their mom (Susanne Wuest) comes home! Yay!

Or…or does she? Their mom was involved in some sort of accident. She had a lot of surgery on her face. So her face is wrapped up in bandages, with just her eyes and mouth visible. But the boys believe that something is different. Their mom is meaner and more distant. She has created a lot of rules that keep the boys mostly in home or right in the yard.

She doesn’t take them to town. She orders in food so they can just be alone for a good long time while she heals. They are alone and they are pretty certain that the lady is not their mother under the bandages. But with a dad out of the picture and no real ability to talk to anyone, what are a couple of kids supposed to do?

Also featuring Hans Escher as a priest and Elfriede Schatz and Karl Purker as two Red Cross workers.

“Why the hell aren’t you showing any faces in these pictures?” – You, the reader.

On the comment card after the film, I wrote “I am completely unsettled.” That wasn’t descriptive enough though. I should have also mentioned that my jimmies were in fact rustled as well. In all honesty, the best way to describe my emotions after the film can probably only be described as an emoji, but I don’t use those and I don’t want to find the appropriate one.

This is not a typical horror. It isn’t full of scares throughout, but a good chunk of the film is instead just a bit eerie. The directors spend a lot of time building the mood before things really start to hit the fan. There are glimpses of madness, but they are in short bursts, or told through dreams, letting the creepiness build.

But the in the entire third act, we reach the level of things you come to expect from the drama, and it pays off wonderfully.

Two aspects of this movie I really enjoyed. One, it is a mystery of sorts technically. But the mystery doesn’t seem to be that important. I imagine most people will “figure it out” before they finally reveal what is going on, but that doesn’t take away from the film. Once I had my guess, I enjoyed watching the film to look for hints or clues to see if what I thought was right. It was still a good experience.

Two, the directors used a lot of silence which is a lacking sound from most modern horrors. Silence is a wonderful tool that can be used to make a situation far more tense. And I don’t mean “Silence, followed by loud scary noise to make you jump!”. No, just silence to make the gross or scary a bit more realistic and thus a bit more darker.

I don’t want to see Goodnight Mommy again. My body couldn’t take it. I hope some of the more graphic scenes eventually leave my brain completely because of how brutal they were. Goodnight Mommy has to be a good horror film, because it scared me into wanting to see it a second time.

I was told I need to watch The Visit, for a few reasons! One, my wife likes a lot of the M. Night Shyamalan films and she needs me to tell her how it is. Good reason.

Two, I have only seen one MNS film in theaters, and that was the terrible After Earth. And come on, that doesn’t count. None of that was typical MNS. And finally, despite thinking otherwise, I have actually seen all of his films but two. I figured I was missing at least 6 or 7 by now, but somehow I have watched most of them. I kind of have to keep going at this point, no matter my preconceived notions.

As for biases, IMDB labels the film as a comedy horror. For some people who have found his recent movies to be laughably bad with terrible twists, this allows him to join in on the joke with him. If he makes things intentionally cheesy, it is a win win for him.

Kind of like how a visit with the grandparents is a win win. They get to feel loved, you get snacks.

Fifteen or so years ago, a woman left her parents house to be with an older man. They had a baby girl, then another kid. Then eventually the man left her to raise the two kids all alone. The whole time the woman would not go back to her parents for help, never communicating with them despite problems in her life.

But then they found her via the internet. They want to see their grand kids! She said no. Grand kids forced it and now Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are going by train to see them! While they are away, The Mom (Kathryn Hahn) is going on a cruise with her boyfriend to get some well deserved time off.

Becca is a smart girl, aspiring film maker, so she wants to make a documentary about her experiences. This will be used as a project to help her mom heal the past between them all and leave to a better life hopefully. Tyler is the younger brother and a rapper, who enjoys free styling about random topics for “the ladies.”

Anyways, when they get to the farm, where there is no real cell phone signal (of course), they find their Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie, not Luke Youngblood) acting strangely. They were supposed to be a couple who offer counseling to sick people at the hospital that they volunteer at. But Pop Pop just seems to clean his guns and chop wood and stay alone. Nana bakes all the time and sometimes has a wild side.

Also there is the rule that they can’t leave their room after 9:30. That is when Nana starts acting even stranger and they wouldn’t want an accident to happen in the confusion. No, not at all.

At the same time, this oven is pretty nice and big and cozy.

Ed Oxenbould has already been in a lot of things in his very young career. In fact, he was Alexander in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. He was also the worst part of that movie. Technically, he was also the worst part of this movie, but in this case, his acting wasn’t bad. Just his actual character had some annoyances.

Shit, I am completely fine with basically everything he did in this movie, except for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad rapping. He freestyles like, 3-4 times in the film and each one is cringeworthy and awkward. It doesn’t feel like it fits his charterer at all. I assume the actor could really do it and so they included it, but I just wanted it to end immediately each time it started.

The Visit is actually a decent comedy when it needs to be and scary at the other points. As we get closer to the end, the balances shift a bit more to the scary side with a bit of absurdity. Despite the shifts in tone, the movie handles it all really well. It never feels jarring to be a bit scared and then laughing a minute later. That being said, this is not going to be the movie for you if you want an extremely funny or scary movie, as both sides are lessened in order to make the narrative work.

I enjoyed Dejonge as the lead, main narrator and it was refreshing to see such a smart teenager in a horror film. It was also interesting to her talk about the documentary she is trying to make, allowing a strange level of meta awareness to the final product movie that ends up being The Village.

More importantly, Dunagan was fantastic. She played a great Nana, pulling off the crazy, confused, and happy extremes that the character went through. The weirdness of the film relies heavily on her character, and if she wasn’t a great actress, the film would have been complete shit.

That’s right. This film wasn’t complete shit. This was a good movie. A good, new, M. Night Shyamalan movie. That factoid is probably the biggest twist of all.

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

Strange as it may sound, to properly start this review I need to talk about The ABCs of Death. If you have never heard of it, it is a horror anthology movie (all the rage these days) with 26 shorts, one for each letter of the alphabet. They have free reign to do basically whatever they want, to match up any word they want to a particular letter. It is an easy way to make a movie, as each director is only involved for a short while and can be done on almost any schedule.

So what does that have to do with Turbo Kid, a retro inspired sci-fi adventure horror (eh) movie?

Well, it turns out that this was inspired by a short made for the anthology that was eventually not used: T is for Turbo. Although it didn’t make it in the film, one of the producers decided that it would be even better as a full feature length film. So they brought Jason Eisener, who directed Hobo with a Shotgun (a movie I still have never watched, sadly), to be executive producer and Turbo Kid was born! And yes, you can watch the short if you click on the title link above.

See kids, dreams really do come true!

You see that? That is a GnomeStick, and it is truly wonderful.

The world is in shambles. The land they live in is now referred to as The Wasteland, and of course it is a post apocalyptic world. The future is a scary place, the year is 1997.

Our hero is named…well, no idea, so let’s call him The Kid (Munro Chambers). He is alone, a scavenger, just him and his bike. He is also a lover of comic books! Who isn’t though, right?

Well, this Kid meets a girl, despite trying to avoid strangers. Her name is Apple (Laurence Laboeuf), she has pink here, is very eccentric, and doesn’t seem like the type of person who could survive in The Wasteland alone. She just wants a friend, and the Kid reluctantly lets her tag along — only if she follows his rules and gets a weapon!

Eventually the Kid finds a cool suit that is straight out of comic books, and when he puts it on he gets super powers! Okay, he just gets a laser cannon gun thing on his arm, that has a timer after a few uses that lets him recharge. But at least it looks cool and snazzy. More importantly, it gives him the confidence to start fighting back.

Fighting back against Zeus (Michael Ironside), self proclaimed ruler of The Wasteland. He has an army of warriors, including Skeletron (Edwin Wright), who shoots out rotating saw blades, and Female Guard (Orphée Ladouceur), who is a woman!

But the Kid isn’t alone, no. He has the help of Frederic (Aaron Jeffery), an Indiana Jones looking mother fucker who arm wrestlers, until he loses his hand early on. And also there is Bagu (Romano Orzani), a trader who was the only friend the Kid had before this mess gets started.

When Metal Man and Skeletor have a baby, you get this lovely killing machine.

I feel like I was transported back into my 1980’s going to see sweet B movies live for the first time. This is of course ridiculous, because I was born in 1989 (Like Taylor Swift. We are both successful people), and I have no memories of being zero or watching movies. It is a ridiculous statement for me to make, and this entire paragraph is down right nonsensical, which makes it a perfect description for Turbo Kid.

I joke a bit, of course. There are character motives, a plot, everything that is necessary for a movie to be comprehensive. The world created is just over the top and very Mad Max-ian. It can easily be pictured as a movie in the franchise, just with a much smaller budget and a kid with lasers as the hero. Fuck it. George Miller needs to just somehow make it canon and everyone would win out in the future if they can eventually crossover.

There was a lot great with this movie, outside of its intentionally bad graphics for the death scenes. The soundtrack is straight out of the 80’s and gives the best vibes possible when watching this movie. And they were very creative when it came to costume (and hair!) designs, weapons, deaths, and sets. It was a visual rainbow explosion, despite the bleak landscape.

The cheese is high with this film and it runs with it. This is why I hate the bad on purpose films like Sharknado so much. Because there can be actual movies that are bad in a good way, like Turbo Kid, or Black Dynamite, that serve as genre parodies while also entertaining people without the use of alcohol.

This review deserves a third picture just to showcase some great costume design or something.

Yes. This will do.

Back in 2012, there were a lot of shitty horror movies. In fact, The Apparition, The Possession, and The Devil Inside would have all made my worst of the year lists if I did them back then.

But there was some hope. We received Sinister. Sure I only gave it a 3 out of 4, but in reality, I think what they did with it was very innovative. It featured Ethan Hawke, who I tend to love or hate (this time was a love). The cinematography was wonderful. The world they built was just overall eerie, and it didn’t feature a lot of jump scares. Just everything in general was scary and creepy as fuck. It was my favorite horror film of the year obviously and I was totally ready for a sequel.

However, maybe the filmmakers or studios weren’t ready for a sequel? Sure, they didn’t rush it out, as they waited 3 years for the next film. I am happy they didn’t try and make this a yearly affair. Those wither up and die rather quickly. Despite my own excitement for Sinister 2, it received barely any pre-screenings for the public or press, which is generally a sign that they know they are releasing a terrible film and just want to get it over with.

The PR company probably just wanted everyone to show the film in small kid focus groups instead. That must be it!

Given what happened in the first film, we don’t expect a direct follow up from our last family. Obviously. So less star power. But hey, we do have our Deputy (James Ransone), who still doesn’t have a real name. But we can call him Ex-Deputy now. He left the police force after the awkwardness of the first film and is getting obsessed with Bughuul and his myths. He is burning down houses to prevent more families from being killed. If no one new can live there, he can protect them! He heads to a farm in Springfield Illinois that had a bad church based accident, but wouldn’t you know it, a family is squatting there. Fuck.

Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) is living there with her two kids, Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan). They are hiding from the husband/dad (Lea Coco), who of course was an angry man and slightly abusive. Of course Bughuul and his posse of kid ghosts are trying to get the smallest kid, Dylan, into turning slowly evil. He is being peer pressured into watching creepy videos of death scenes, a few of them a lot more graphic and fucked up than the first film.

Now Ex-Deputy really doesn’t know what to do. He wants to protect the family, but weird stuff will happen while they are in the house, but if they leave, the real tragedy will take place. Fuck. While dealing with that, he is also interacting with Dr. Stomberg (Tate Ellington), who has information on potential Bughuul sightings in Norway with Ham radios. Weird. Also Lucas Jade Zumann plays head kid ghost, Milo.

The power of motion capture compels you!

Sinister 2 is not as good as Sinister. Everyone anywhere will agree with this fact. But just because it is technically worse on every level does not make itself a bad film.

Specifically on what is worse, the cinematography is just completely average. A regular movie. What really built the tension in the first film involved these sleek sexy shots. The fear didn’t involve jump scares, but appropriately creepy scenes and the occasional movement, sure. Outside of creepy videos in the sequel, the only scares came from very expected jump scares.

Not just jump scares, but a lot of them were audio based jump scares, where my ears were blasted with terrible sounds. Their way of doing eerie music during the kill videos was just a scratchy record player attached to the olde fashioned camera. Maybe my theater just made everything stupid loud, but regular objects being freakishly loud to attempt scares got really old, really quick.

In terms of plot, it was interesting to have the abuse plot. It was good to have something not focused on the evil spirit, but halfway through it made me wonder if it would have better if they still stayed in the abusive house. You know. Cause demons. It was also enjoyable to have a link to the first film, in regards to the deputy, although I definitely forgot about his character completely. Another good note is they didn’t try to go into the backstory of the demon. No, we focused on the dead kids and a point of view of a kid instead of one of the adults. It was a nice change, just still not as good as the first.

Also, the last scene was stupid. Setting up for a future movie with a different twist. It was just dumb. True fact.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Shit, I have a hard enough time remembering the title. When mentioning it out loud I have been calling it A Girl Walks Home At Midnight. Close enough right? Not at all.

I knew it was supposed to be scary, but I also knew it was extremely stylized and also with subtitles. So it is one of those films I need to be in the right mood for in order to even begin to appreciate it.

I like new and exciting things! But potential super artsy foreign films are obviously one of my weaknesses. They usually don’t involve cool super heroes or things blowing up.

Well, I guess she is sort of in a costume.

AGWHAAN takes place in a make believe town called Bad City in Iran. You can tell it is make believe, because it is called Bad City.

It is a very small city, not a lot of people involved, but enough people for drugs. There is only one gangster asshole, Saeed (Dominic Rains), a pimp and drug dealer. He is a bad dude, and he has gotten Hossein (Marshall Manesh) hooked on drugs! That is bad for Hossein, for many obvious reasons, but even worse for Arash (Arash Marandi), our hero(?) and Hossein’s son.

Arash had his car taken by Saeed because his dad owes money. That suchs for Arash, who worked hard to get that slick sexy car! Oh, and Saeed also is abusive to his women, like Atti (Mozhan Marnò).

Which is why he gets fucked up by a vampire! The Girl (Sheila Vand) totally goes all vampire on him! You know, the one who walks home alone. At night.

The Girl isn’t just some random blood sucking fiend. No, she has morals. She killed Saeed because he was a bad dude. And there are more bad people in this small town. But is Arash a bad dude or his he just desperate?

Hopefully she knows for sure before she sucks his blood too. Also featuring Rome Shadanloo.

Arash is a James Dean looking motherfucker. I don’t mean the male porn star of the similar name.

AGWHAAN is definitely an interesting film, and an even more interesting acronym. There is both a lot and only a little that goes on, so what does end up happening has to be paid attention to for the film to drive home its message.

The message being that it can make a pretty killer soundtrack.

That and the visuals were the best parts. Each frame was shot meticulously in order to heighten you senses to what is going on. AGWHAAN is not a standard horror in any shape or form. There are no jump scares, no real scares at all, just several tense moments. Quite a few longer shots are done in this film, often with just characters staring at at each other, with dialogue at the very minimum.

At the same time, it is easy to understand that someone would say not a lot happens in this film. It is true. It can feel quite long and drawn out with not enough gusto behind the scenes to keep your interest. So I see it in two ways. If the film can keep your interest the whole time, you will go on a pretty unique experience when it comes to modern vampire films. If it doesn’t, it will feel like a lot of wasted potential, with some cool shit that occassionall happens.

Which unfortunately for my street cred, the latter is how I see it. Some cool shit happens, and a lot of other drawn out scenes. Oh well. It is still a stylistically beautiful film, the black and white do a lot of favors. Just not my cup of blood, so to speak.

The Gallows has a decent trailer. I say that in that it doesn’t give the whole movie away. They only show literally one scene of a girl crying under the red light of an exit sign. And then of course she dies by the bad guy of the movie. That is it. We aren’t seen every scary moment in the trailer, we are shown just enough to tease us into watching it.

Despite how the movie goes, I am stoked that the trailer wasn’t terrible, in a time and age where it feels like everything cool and somewhat spoilery is shown because they assume the average movie goer wants to see it.

The Gallows trailer showed me so little that the movie looked like it could be scary and something I could enjoy, all in about a minute! Hooray advertising!

Unless of course the trailer is actually the final scene. If they do what The Apparition or (even worse) Quarantine did, I will be quite upset with the whole thing.

Fun Fact: This is the elusive actress who was in God’s Not Dead that I couldn’t find the name of last year.

Twenty years ago, disaster struck Beatrice High School. They were putting on an original play called The Gallows, and everything was period specific and ye olde well done. Except for the ending. When Charlie was actually hung from the gallows, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. That wasn’t part of the script.

But now it is modern times! And to honor the tragedy, the drama club has decided to fucking put the play on again. They had to fight the school board and PTA, but damn it, it is happening, no matter how terrible the play looks. Also apparently at this school, the play is done by a real drama class, which a lot of kids are forced to take for elective reasons. They don’t have to act, they could be backstage or tech crew people! Like Ryan (Ryan Shoos), who thinks the whole thing is a big joke and is recording things so we can get a movie. Ryan and Reese (Reese Mishler) are football players, although Reese quit the team to star in the play awkwardly enough. He is starring along side Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), a drama geek who actually likes acting but no one likes her. (EXCEPT FOR REESE THAT IS. OH SNAP).

Also Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) is involved, because she is Ryan’s girlfriend.

Long story short, Reese is a terrible actor. He can’t remember a lot of his lines and has no delivery. But he likes Pfeifer. So Ryan convinces them to sneak into the auditorium before opening night to trash the set. Ryan could then comfort Pfeifer and both of them be upset over the no play thing. But Pfeifer catches them at the theater because she saw his car! And then…and then…the doors all lock. No way out of the school for some reason. Ohhhh boy. This is creepy. Especially if there is some ghost spirit Charlie thing running around haunting shit and trying to kill these kids.

Or maybe it is not a ghost. Maybe it is someone super mad about something. Like the stage boy/manager (Price T. Morgan). Or the drama teacher (Travis Cluff). Or that old lady who went to the school 20 years ago and watches each rehearsal (Melissa Bratton). Or Reese’s dad (Theo Burkhardt). Or David the Janitor (David Herrera), because he works at night and stuff.

And lets not forget about the butler or the lighting guy!

The Gallows clocks in at barely 80 minutes, not counting the credits, so it is another of those short horror films like Unfriended. The good news about these short horrors is that if they suck, you aren’t wasting too much time to see if the payout is worth it. The entire film felt like it was teetering on that edge between waste of time and kind of awesome, making it a more frustrating experience.

A lot of people hate the “found footage” genre of horror film, because a lot of films end up doing it badly. Unfortunately, this is a badly done version of the format. After they get into the high school, the only reason anyone uses a camera is for the light features, and apparently they only work (whether phone or real camera) if it is on and recording. This causes them to needlessly lose power and other bad situations when it became plot convenient. [Technically unrelated, but a bad feature of the genre: Our screening went fuzzy about 15 minutes in and it took 15 minutes for the theater to notice, because given the format, the lack of focus could have technically been a feature!]

The acting isn’t that great, which is fair since these are all just scared teenagers mostly. The film did scare me a few times, but almost the entire film is jump scares, which is a bit disappointing.

The best thing going for the movie is actually its plot. Yeah, I know. The film wraps everything up nicely by the end, with a few twists and turns to show that they had an actual point to their film and not just an easy to make horror. I loved the ending, just thought the rest could have been a bit better on the scare department.