Tag: Horror

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.

Hey, didn’t I just talk about this? Yeah, last week or so! The weird genre of watching a bunch of people famous from TV shows make a movie together. I just talked about it with Adult Beginners, and now I can talk about it again with The Lazarus Effect.

This time we have a guy from The League, a girl from House, and a guy from Community.

The good news about all of this is I have never really seen a group of TV stars do a horror movie. It is almost always, 100% of the time, an independent comedy drama where not a lot happens.

But this is a horror! Time to party because it is new and different!

Science! Party! Happy times!

This isn’t just a scary movie. It is a scary SCIENCE movie, about science going to far and playing god.

The scientists in question are Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde), who are not only partners, but also dating. Oh snap. Personal lives mixing with work lives. How scandalous. They started their university research into something about coma patients, but now they are on to something even bigger and more sciency. Instead of helping coma patient, it might bring the dead back to life. Kind of fucked up, right? After doing some science stuff, they are finally able to get it to work on a dog. They had some assistants of course, Niko (Donald Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters), for more witnesses.

Speaking of witnesses, they even have a girl with a video camera, Eva (Sarah Bolger), so no one cries bullshit after success.

Well, obviously the dog is now alive, but the dog is acting a bit weird. Aggression based weirdness mostly. Oh well.

What’s that? They can’t do more research because it is awkward and sneaky and some pharmaceutical company is going to take it all? What’s that, Zoe is suddenly dead thanks to an accident while trying to re-do the experiment? Oh my goodness, Zoe is back alive? That is fantastic. It works on humans. Now they can find out what it is like to die and what she can tell them and hopefully she doesn’t turn all psycho and kill everyone.

That wouldn’t be okay!

I would also probably hide if Olivia Wilde came walking down the hall.

The first thing you will notice about The Lazarus Effect is that it is unusually short. Some horror films are short because everything takes place during a small amount of time, like in Unfriended, and it worked very nicely. Unfriended also got to the “horror” part of the film pretty early on, so there wasn’t a lot of time wasted.

This film, however, dawdles pretty hard core. They had what felt like several different plot lines going on to lead up to the sudden human trial to save Zoe’s life, but that also took up at least a third if not half of the film. That would be the plot about getting the science right, dealing with a slowly more aggressive dog, and the company coming in to take their work and having them lose everything. That is a big chunk of the movie, but none of it is really that scary. So that is pretty disappointing. You would think with less than 80 minutes of film, that sort of thing can be rushed or already assumed to get us to the part most viewers would care about. For instance, it can start with the formula just working on a dog? Yeah, that would give us more time to focus on scary stuff!

But alas, it is a mostly non terrifying horror movie which is a shame. The acting also is nothing special, and rarely is in a horror film.

The reason I am giving it the average passing score is that at least it tried to make a reasonable and not completely shitty plot. The main issue is that the plot seemed to also forget the fact that it is a horror movie. I need two things to happen in a horror film to give it a rating above a 2. It has to be both scary AND entertaining. This one has only minor scary parts near the end, and is average on the entertainment.

Should there be a sequel, which I doubt, it should be able to deliver more scares as we should be passed all the set up. But it also doesn’t really deserve a chance to make up the lack of horror.

Rodney Ascher is a weird guy. I don’t talk about directors of documentaries a lot, but this is important. I have technically reviewed three of his works on my site. He did the Q segment of The ABCs of Death 2, which I honestly barely remember. He also did the documentary Room 237 which felt a lot like torture. That is a very polarizing movie and whatever a lot of people got out of it, I got none of it.

And now he is directing The Nightmare documentary, which is a bit of a hybrid documentary. It involves real people, telling presumably real stories and anecdotes, but also recreations of what they are talking about. At this point you might be asking, “Well, what are they talking about?!” and if you were, you aren’t very good at context clues.

They are talking about nightmares of course! But not any of your sissy girl falling out of bed nightmares. No, a much serious and scarier phenomenon known as sleep paralysis which affects dozens of people world wide. Dozens!

It is also one of the scariest things I have ever heard about that could potentially be a giant elaborate ruse to scare me.

Holy fuck, it is working too!

I don’t remember when I first heard about sleep paralysis, but it was probably 4 or more years ago on the internet. A lot of people told similar stories, about how they would sometimes dream of themselves lying in bed but they couldn’t move their body at all. They would try to, but nothing would work. Some of them would imagine some dark entity/cat/demon sitting on their chest, preventing from moving. That sounds terrifying enough, but it isn’t even the scariest parts.

Others could see intruders in their room. Literal dark shadow shapes, static shapes, alien shapes, whatever their messed up psychosis wants. It could involve the creepiest conversations. It could involve other people they know and love. But they just have to lay there and take it.

I don’t think my crazy ramblings trying to explain it all are the best way to learn about this stuff though. Personal anecdotes from those who experience it with vivid detail? That is the way to go. Or better yet, anecdotes with recreations just to terrify you even more.

The editing on this hybrid documentary was great. The music department and the recreations were very on point and would have had me on the edge of my seat the entire time if I was in a chair. If you must know, I was definitely laying down as I watched this documentary.

Of course, this documentary might not be the best idea either. There are reports of people gaining some sleep paralysis after hearing about it from someone else. So I might have screwed a portion of the readers of this review, and for that I don’t apologize. These are the type of risks you must take when you go to a site owned and operated by Gorgons, after all.

Another movie that attached it itself to the Hype Train Caboose, It Follows was able to to launch itself from limited release to a full scale wide release in a matter of weeks. Weeks! With a wide release, unfortunately, came a lack of VOD release which was also supposed to happen.

Which is why I took so long to see it! Family life, very busy.

I made sure when I finally got to see it though that I maximized the potential scariness factor. I watched in on the scariest of days at the scariest of times. You know, Wednesday afternoon.

Although watching a horror movie in the middle of a pool might have Wednesday beat.

Girl Jay (Maika Monroe) meets boy Hugh (Jake Weary). Girl dates boy a few times. Boy is a bit weird. Boy lied about his name and home. Boy and girl have sweet sensual car sex. Boy chloroforms girl and ties her up.

Things are not going good for Jay! So when she finally wakes up, Hugh is acting even weirder than normal. Apparently having sex with her has passed “It” on to her. What is It? Well, he doesn’t really know. But apparently It is an entity that will walk towards her always and eventually try to kill her. Yep. And if she dies, it will then go back after Hugh. He got it from a random one night stand. See. Jay just needs to pass it on to someone else, tell them the same thing, and hope it travels far enough from her to never bother her again.

If she believes him. Until then, it is just a terrible rape from a crazy man who lied to her.

Until you know, she actually sees this thing coming toward her at several different times, and no one else can. She enlists her friends help, but they can only do so good, not being able to see it and all. She has her sister (Lili Sepe), a boy who crushes on her (Keir Gilchrist), a neighborhood boy with a car (Daniel Zovatto), and another friend (Olivia Luccardi).

Do you see It? DO YOU SEE?

Alright, imagine if you will a regular-ish person walking towards you, potentially naked, maybe slightly hurt. Just walking. That isn’t too bad. It is like a single zombie that only you can see. Mike Myers was scary because he was a fast walker, had a weapon and a mask.

Well, I was surprised at how frighting it could be. It Follows implores basically zero cheap jump scares. Everything is open and obvious. Sure, a lot of fear comes from the fact that the entity is now suddenly in the general area, but it is never “suddenly there in front of the camera omg scary!”. But this movie isn’t just about fears, or just an interesting STI allegory. It is about the fear of death. It is a bit about the fear of the future in general.

But also this movie is about EXCELLENT camera work and a killer (heh) soundtrack. Most scenes are nicely set up to feel both how big and small the world around you can feel. If you like synthesizers, you will feel at home in this movie.

Again, let me reiterate. I was terrified at many different times throughout the film, fearing for the protagonist and wondering how she could get out of the mess. You know, without sleeping around and passing on the curse to other people. That would be rude, to trick people into sex knowing you would put something like that on them.

Fuck. It Follows was so good, it blew away everything horror wise in 2014. I didn’t give a single scary movie last year a 4 out of 4. Half the year done and I already have one! Maybe Sinister 2 can recreate its predecessor. Highly unlikely, but you never know!

Final day of Blackweek which also means I can pick almost anything I want! After all, since Black Mass isn’t out yet, I don’t have any other super new 2015 movies to review.

And I really had no idea what I wanted to watch. So as I often do in this situation, I went to Netflix and just searched around. This time was a bit easier, as I also got to search for the word “Black” and narrow down my results pretty significantly.

The reason I settled on Black Rock is for a few reasons. One, I didn’t have any horror-esque movies this week, just a thriller. And honestly a lot of horror movies have “Black” in the title. Secondly, out of all five or so movies I could have actually picked from that fit all my requirements, this is the only one I had heard of. With people I knew in it. And it wasn’t made for TV!

And familiarity leads to happy reviews because I can name drop facts or past reviews the actors have been in! We call that movie synergy.

We call this boat workingy.

Girls just wanna have fu-un. That’s what they really waaa-a-aa-aannnt. And to not die. But back up a bit.

Sarah (Kate Bosworth), Lou (Lake Bell), and Abby (Katie Aselton) have been friends since they were kids. And when they were kids, they used to go to a local island to play games, build forts, do outdoorsy things, probably experiment sexually. I don’t know, I don’t know what kids do on islands. The only book I read about it was pretty fucked up though.

They have some issues now, but they want to put the past behind and enjoy each others company. Well, while out gallivanting and arguing, they run into three hunters (Will Bouvier, Jay Paulson, Anslem Richardson), and hang out with them. They party with them! These guys all fought in the war too, but they are back. And then they DRINK with them. Well, one of our ladies gets flirty and starts to make out with one of our dudes. But he goes farther than she wants, and won’t stop when she wants him to stop. So she flails and hits him on the head with a rock.

Fatally. A black rock, maybe. Who can tell, it was night time. Other two hunters don’t like this and beat up the ladies and don’t know what to do. Well, they end up escaping, so now dudes with guns are looking for them on an island and they don’t have anything to help them. Ruh roh. Fucking hunters.

This is how you all must feel, having received zero movie synergy after my tease up.

Wait wait wait wait wait let me check something. The rating. “Rated R for some strong violence, pervasive language, sexual references and brief graphic nudity”.

BRIEF GRAPHIC NUDITY MY ASS (heh). That means a flash of a body. There was about ten minutes of naked women in the last 30 minutes of the movie. Nothing was brief about that. Did the MPAA not watch that? It was a very surprising scene, needless to say. It was a scene that you’d imagine as being very quick but you know. Ten fucking minutes. It is an eighty minute movie. A huge percentage of it is just nakedness.

Speaking of how long this movie is, I honestly feel the biggest issue is that it should be even shorter. There was not enough story to make it last. The first part of the movie, the set up, the trip to the island, the chick bonding. I don’t remember how long that lasted, but it just seemed to drag. It obviously started to speed up once we introduced the dudes, but the intro was slow.

Overall, I was surprised by how brutal the whole movie felt. It wasn’t a normal thriller/horror, as it was going for a realistic vibe. And it showed. You see the ladies up there? Beat up, cut up, black eyes. It only gets worse. Simple things seem to take people down and nothing is super movie like.

It was so real, I definitely wouldn’t want to watch it again, let’s say that. But also, not fantastic enough to warrant a second viewing either.

Are you excited? They made a sequel to The Woman in Black!!

Why do I hear crickets? Must be my refusal to try to buy more bug spray. I personally have no idea what anyone else thought about The Woman In Black, and I am far too lazy right now to look something like that up, but I thought it was a dull. Harry Potter did nothing for me. Just was an period piece British film, with a shitty ending, and a shitty everything else also. I would have never guessed a sequel could have happened.

Because now we have The Woman In Black 2: Angel of Death. I have to assume Great Britain went bananas over the first film. I am pretty sure it was a remake or a book or something first, and they probably like anything set in their country.

From what I can tell this thing isn’t even really related to the first movie. Different actors/characters. Maybe a different ghost, but that would be Troll 2 levels of dumb. Honestly, if it has anything to do with the first film, I wouldn’t even remember.

Oh it’s a creepy looking doll that a kid likes. That’s normal in horror now, I guess.

This sequel takes place in World War II, which is either before or after the first film. Again, I remember jack shit about it. We have a very universal concept here. Britain is getting bombed occasionally, so a lot of kids have lost family. Orphans and double orphans. Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) is a teacher of orphans, and their school is going to go leave the bustling city of London to live in the countryside instead. You know, where the Nazis should not be bombing. Her headmistress (Helen McCrory), Eve, and a bunch of kids head out to live in an abandoned building, to be safe.

But of course they won’t be safe. This is a horror movie sequel. And it is the country so we have inherently creepy looking people like Hermit Jacob (Ned Dennehy) running around. Thankfully there is a hunky man, a pilot, Harry (Jeremy Irvine), and another guy, the air raid warden (Adrian Rawlins). Gosh, could they be anymore safe?

Anyways. Haunted mansion type movie. Little kids going missing. Mute kid (Oaklee Pendergast) is of course involved, cause that bitch can’t talk.

But oh nelly can he scream. Suuu-eeeee! Suuuu-eeee!

Yawn yawn yawn. No surprise. A sequel to a movie I disliked I didn’t find great. But man, it was just so dang boring. And British. Not that British things can’t be scary. But this doesn’t at all feel like a concept worth even creating. They didn’t add anything new to the horror genre.

It just seems like a ham fisted concept, that vaguely is related to another film, to make money. It is literally Troll 2ing us. Right in front of our eyes. Oh, the ghost is a woman in black, who hates kids? Fits. Done.

Fuckkkk. It is just. It is full of boring characters, boring plot, boring scares, and nothing new. Throwing in a bad ass subtitle doesn’t make a bad ass film. It makes it generic.

Generic horror is maybe worse than generic comedy. Maybe. It’s just the level of mediocrity that we should all avoid in order to make it through the night, actually entertained. Boooo boring. Yay entertainment.

I like history. By that, I of course mean History I can relate too. You know, western cultural stuff. Cough cough.

But hey, old Egyptian history is super close to that. It is like, pre-Greece. Similar to Mesopotamian stuff. So it kind of fits the narrative.

Of course, The Pyramid probably doesn’t have any real history in it. But it might make reference to pharaohs, or some important event. As long as it tries. As Above, So Below was a horror movie that tried to add some historical elements into it, along with a couple decent fear moments. So I am definitely giving The Pyramid a chance. As long as it isn’t aliens.

(Sighs) It’s always aliens.

And you thought there was nothing new to discover about pyramids. But thanks to science! and technology! they have actually found a NEW Egyptian pyramid. Who are they? Dr. Nora Holden (Ashley Hinshaw) and Dr. Miles Holden (Denis O’Hare), a father/daughter Archaeologist team. This pyramid was discovered underneath the sand, so it is way older than the other pyramids. Old enough to be buried! Oh man! The discoveries!

So many discoveries, that they are making a documentary about its discovery, the digging up, and hopefully its juicy/sexy insides. Sunni (Christa Nicola) will be the director/star, and she wants an emmy. Also has Fitzie (James Buckley) as a camera man. They even have a 3 million dollar robot thing to walk the halls before anyone else and discover traps, or pit falls, or whatever.

But unfortunately, Egypt is having unrest. A lot of political turmoil, so the crew is going to have to stop before they can go inside. Well that sucks. Maybe they can just quickly have the robot go in real quick to get some footage before they wait for some time. Maybe they can quickly go in there to get the robot once it breaks down. Maybe they can get out once they get lost and walls seem to be closing in around them. Maybe…

Also featuring Amir K and Faycal Attougui.

My daddy always said, “If you find a human size hole, you should crawl through it. For Science.”

This film for the most part is of the “found footage” genre. We have a couple cameras for documentary / science reasons, and a robot with cameras! But also, a lot of scenes are just regular camera scenes too. It kind of just flowed how it wanted to (See picture 2), and went with a regular camera to make a better movie. And you know what, good for them. End of Watch did that, and End of Watch was fucking amazing.

But the found footage I don’t think was done great either. Annoying in all the wrong (right? How do I make this sentence?) places.

The actors weren’t too great. Seemed like another case of smart people, dumb decisions.

But overall, I still think the movie was okay. Why? Because I really like “the villain”. The Pyramid has secrets. I will just say we aren’t stuck with aliens, nor are we stuck with some lame mummy. They at least attempted to do something cool with this movie. They tried something, by golly! And the reveal didn’t wait for the last five minutes or anything, we got to see it multiple times and the reveal didn’t ruin the scare. The scares were okay. Not fantastic, just okay. Much like how I think about the overall movie.

One word, relatively new, much fear.

Unfriended. How could someone be so cruel? Don’t you know they’re human too? …I’m gonna watch it anyways.

Sure, one could look at the title of the movie and the plot and think, “Yep, just another shitty modern horror.”

But for some odd reason I found it drawing. I thought it could have been made for me. But then again, I enjoyed the movie Smiley, which was also about modern tech things and a killer. Unfriended is already such a cold term, I can’t wait to see how they make fun of it.

And if you hate the title, you have to admit that it is better than the original name for the movie: Cybernatural.

Who would have thought the new face of evil was previously a sign of laziness?

Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman) killed herself. She was a pretty, relatively popular high school girl. But then she got super drunk one night at a party as a junior. Someone posted a video of her drunk, including the embarrassing after math and suggested she kill herself. Sure enough, she did it.

But that is old news. That is the past. That was a year ago today.

We should instead talk about sex. Because what is the point of skype if not helping take your long distance relationship to the next level? Or close distance relationship with over protective parents. Blaire Lilly (Shelley Hennig) and Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are teasing each other when they get forced into a giant Skype call with all of their friends. Fatass Ken (Jacob Wysocki), prep looking Adam (Will Peltz), and party girl Jess (Renee Olstead).

But hey, there is some glitchy other user in their chat. Some billie person. It can’t get kicked out, it stays when they restart the call, and it has no profile picture. Oh well, must be a glitch.

What is not a glitch is Laura randomly messaging a few people. Someone must have hacked her account and is trying to scare her friends. That’s not cool. Unless of course, it is a spirit doing all of this, and wanting to possess the group of friends into committing suicide. But that’d be awkward. Also there is Val (Courtney Halverson), as the random stuck up bitch other popular girl.

Sexting is so middle school.

Did I mention this entire movie takes place on Blaire’s computer screen? She has a mac of course, a nice laptop. Has the Spotify, the Skypes, the iMessage, the Facebooks, the ChatRoulette. She has it all. And the entire film, again, is through the screen. You might be thinking one of two things: Modern Family did it first. And that sounds terrible.

Technically, the Modern Family episode came out before this one, but this film was released a long time ago in film festivals. So who knows if Modern Family even knew that. As for the other fact, no, it is totally entertaining. Mostly thanks to the directors incredible attention to detail.

First of all, the movie is set in real time. The clock in the top right corner moves every minute, and by golly, it matches a real minute. The computer screen is incredibly realistic, as are Blaire’s typing speed, cursor movements, and literally just tabs open/search history. Everything. It feels realistic as fuck. Shit, there are even a couple hidden jokes I found in it.

At the same time, some of the attention to detail seems to be a bit lazy. For instance, previous messages randomly disappearing despite tabs never actually getting closed. There was one moment when Blaire had to share her screen in the Skype, which I guess is doable. Cool. But she never unshared it then did some awkward things after the fact, but it had closed by that point and that didn’t become a plot point for her being dumb. Long amounts of time with no one talking on Skype while Blaire does something else. Maybe she takes off her headphones during these moments, I don’t know. Things like that. The details are both infuriating at times and almost awe-inspiring. A lot of them they can just blame on computer ghost/hacker shit though, I guess.

Oh yeah, and this movie would have scared the poop out of me if I didn’t already poop four times that day. A huge part of it is the noise I would say. So many scares come from sudden noises. Incoming messages, Skype calls, wall posts, typing noises. All of it. Ahh. I never really want to hear a Skype call noise ever again, so I hope I can change it. I had to sit with my hands over my face so many times thanks to knowing that something fucked up was about to happen and I didn’t think my body could handle it.

Unfriended is new and modern, it has a unique enough twist, it is perfect at its 80something minute length, it is scary and tense, and it is overall a frightening time. Now excuse me while I burn the laptop that I wrote this review on.