Hide and Seek (2005)

Mental health is a tough thing to tackle in movies. Some of them get it right, some of them do it poorly, and others seem to not realize that they're about as sensitive at tackling the subject as an actor using blackface to talk about Rosa Parks. Guess which one this movie is!

Director: John Polson

Starring: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning

IMDb

Co-written with Colin and Michelle.

Holy fuck this movie is bad. I saw this like, ten years ago now, and hated it then too, and I think I may even hate it more now. This was one of several absolute duds Robert de Niro did in the mid 2000s, and it's just painful. I guess it begins pretty innocuously with a mother saying goodnight to her daughter Emily, played by Dakota Fanning. I'm sure nothing bad is gonna happen to the mom when she says she loves her daughter.

But of course it does, because any movie that throws in non sequitur lines like that always has bad shit happen to the characters. In this case, she gets, erm, how should I put it? Ah yes - “Dexter Season 4'd.”

Clearly this was all the result of a deranged and oddly specific killer who always kills married women in bathtubs. There's no other option.

Why do all of these limp-dick thriller flicks have characters taking baths in such nice tubs anyway? I wish I had one with the candles around it and shit. If it was a slasher movie, though, it'd be a girl in her 20s in the shower. That's actually the barometer of how you tell what genre of horror you're watching. If a slightly older woman takes a bath, you're watching a psychological thriller. If a hot chick takes a shower with the camera angled down, it's a slasher. Just the rules, guys.

You can tell what type of shitty movie you're watching from how women bathe in it, which is pretty creepy and weird when you think about it.

We then fast forward through the funeral because fuck that, who cares? No, now it's time for them to do what they do in every shitty ass horror movie – go up to some kind of mountain retreat in a small podunk town to “heal.” It works for a Stephen King novel because he can at least write good characters. In this movie, it's just more nice house porn – ooh, look at all these nice furniture items! Those must have cost a lot of money at Ikea!

I wish I had that desk. That's the nicest thing I can say about the entire movie.

Robert de Niro plays the grieving father, David. Well, grieving, as in just kind of bored and annoyed looking throughout all of this. He's terrible in this; about as exciting as watching a sea algae try to emote. What happened to him? Did all the charisma and power get sucked out of him with a vacuum cleaner?

Oh, and I guess the story, if you even care, is that little Emily keeps on apparently doing weird things in the house like writing on the walls of the bathtub in blood, and blaming it on an imaginary friend named Charlie. I guess this is normal for de Niro's character, as he never thinks to send her to therapy in this.

Yup, you read right – he doesn't take her to therapy. Even through all the weird, traumatizing shit that happens in this, he just sticks to his guns and keeps her out there alone in that big house. No talking to anyone, no therapy, nothing. Jack shit. The funniest part is that HE HIMSELF is supposed to be a therapist in this movie! That's his character's occupation! And you're telling me he doesn't think it's a good idea to have her talk to someone about her mother's death and get through it healthily? Bull fucking shit.

"The way she's sitting motionless in a cliche way staring out a window like this is some kind of Lifetime movie about a mental patient really makes me think she is psychologically okay."

But no, I guess hanging out in an empty house and letting your daughter just run around outside doing nothing is good too. There's a scene early on where David is walking with the two guys showing him the house, for like a minute or two around the corner of it, and they lose Emily. She's standing around in the same spot, but the fact that David took his eyes off her for that long should have been a warning sign that he's as good a parent as Casey Anthony was, really.

"Hey, where's your daughter, David?"
"What daughter? I'm just walking along here, without a care in the world! Ha ha ha!"
"You're a disgrace to the very concept of parenting, you slime!"

There are a bunch of weird-ass scenes where David has dreams of a masquerade ball, like an Eyes Wide Shut party I guess, except with all the sexual energy of a juvenile detention center. Then he wakes up and it's 2:06 a.m. exactly. It comes off like the let his seven year old child watch Jacob's Ladder and then contribute to the script.

Instead of orgies and weird masks, they just got a bunch of gold balloons from the dollar store. I mean c'mon guys, not even a variety of colors for us to look at? Pffffftttttttt.

"Ah yes, 2:06, my favorite time ever..."

The rest of the movie's first two acts are taken up by a seemingly never-ending parade of red herrings that march through like lemmings on their way off a cliff. Hey, you never know! Any of them could be the killer! It's good writing, really!

There's the two neighbors, with the wife who acts really nice and neighborly and the husband who is the kind of guy who sits next to little girls he doesn't know in a creepy manner and remarks about how beautiful they are:

Apparently they had a child who died, so Emily reminds them of their own child. But it's still not really that interesting or well done of a plot...

Then there's Elizabeth Shue, who plays a woman named Elizabeth – what a stretch that must have been for her.

"Yup, I'm in this movie! Really!"

She has a daughter who she brings over to play with Emily. Emily, being a true friend, does this to the daughter's doll, while talking in a really creepy voice about how bad things will happen.

That's never mentioned again, by the way – the daughter doesn't show up again, but Shue never mentions it to David and David never talks to Emily about it. It's cool though. Disfiguring dolls and talking creepily about how bad things happen is just the normal way little girls deal with tragedy.

There's also Creepy Bearded Man, who shows up at 2 a.m. just to give David the keys to some of the other rooms in the house, because he's apparently leaving for Canada with his wife. No explanation is ever given for why, and we never see him again. It's just an incredibly random, out of nowhere scene.

I'm guessing he committed some heinous crime and is now fleeing the country to escape the law. That's what I'm going with and it does make the film slightly more entertaining. Slightly.

But yeah, a large majority of the film is just David and Emily playing off one another so poorly I'm surprised the crew wasn't falling asleep filming it. And the psychology is just bad, really bad. There really is just a shitload of excuses made for her behavior in this – the writing on the bathroom wall continues appearing, Emily keeps blaming Charlie, and David just keeps shrugging it off. At one point a dead cat is found in the bathtub, with all signs pointing towards Emily as the one who did it.

Just another normal part of the grieving process.

But does that faze David at all? Nope! Not in the least. I mean, it does at least get him on the phone with his hot therapist friend played by Famke Janssen. But even after she comes out in person and tells him that Emily needs professional help, he still doesn't do it. He says he'll wait two more weeks and see if she gets better. Two weeks?! I guess you really want to see how many more animals she can kill, huh?

And I guess these drawings don't signify a child in need of therapy either:

"Wow, my daughter really can't draw!"

For those of you watching this who think 'Jesus, how long till someone dies and he still doesn't take her to therapy?', well, Elizabeth comes over later. She finds out David isn't home and yet hangs out with Emily and chats like they're old friends over a cup of tea. For those of you who aren't paying attention – this is a grown woman just chatting it up with a nine year old girl. What the hell kind of person acts like that? No normal adult would do this! “Hey, I'll just come over and hang out with your nine year old daughter! Maybe play some hide and seek or something!” “Sure, man, any time!”

And yeah, that is what happens – Elizabeth agrees to play hide and seek with Emily and “Charlie” the imaginary friend. Because the writers of this movie are about as attentive to realistic human behavior as a space alien seeing Earth for the first time. Fortunately, an unseen killer leaps out of the closet and shoves Elizabeth out the window, killing her instantly.

David wakes up from his almost surely alcohol fueled sleep and finds the police at the door, asking about Elizabeth's disappearance as they found her car nearby. He tells them he hasn't seen her, then finds her dead body upstairs in the bathroom. You'd think this would finally be the point where he gets the police involved, but no, we're building up to a TWIST at the end! So, you know, nothing has to make sense.

David mostly just shouts like a geriatric person lost at Walmart. He puts on a yellow rainslicker to go outside and goes and buries the body. Then he goes inside and finds a bunch of boxes, unopened, full of stuff he thought he'd been using this whole time. This...somehow leads him to the revelation that he killed his wife because she cheated on him at that party he kept dreaming about all movie long:

Maybe she cheated on you because you're the kind of weirdo who gets a split personality when she cheats on you.

Wow. That's fucking amazing psychology you're using there, movie! His wife cheated on him...so he killed her and several other people! Makes sense to me when you didn't bother to give him any other character or explore his disease at all. Hell, why bother? If you have a split personality, you probably killed people already and don't know it. Too bad for you, sucker. Guess you're fucked.

So, of course, like every other shitty ass movie like this, he then goes on a killing spree. He kills the sheriff, because in every horror and thriller movie without a brain, the cops have no purpose but to get axed off in the climax because they apparently aren't good at their jobs. Oh, and there's also a dumb scene where he plays hide and seek with Emily while hunting for her. Actually it's not even hide and seek - he's shouting about Marco Polo half the time. That's right; he can't even get the right stupid kids' game to shout about coinciding with the movie's title.

"Here's...Jimmy? I dunno. I'm old and bad at this."

If you think it's sad that a great actor like de Niro has been reduced to shouting "Marco Polo" while trying to kill a little girl - and failing, even at that - well, you're right. It is sad. I don't have a joke here. I just think that's really fucking sad.

Anyway, he gets stuck in a random Pan's Labyrinth-esque cave on the property (just go with it; the movie is almost over at this point), and gets shot down by the lady therapist, who showed up somewhere in between the ridiculousness of the last few scenes.

Fast forward to some time in the future, and Emily now lives with the therapist, and goes to school. But she drew a picture of her with two heads, so ooh, that must mean she has multiple personalities now or whatever. Because I guess multiple personalities are kind of like a hereditary thing – if you have them, your kids probably will too and it will be like a growing genetic tree-chart of serial-killing multiple personalities. Hooray for nonsense!

And she's still a terrible artist!

My favorite part is how she apparently still didn't get any therapy or counseling! Both her parents are dead? Fuck it, just send her back to school. She's living with a therapist now after all. So she'll be fine.

This whole thing is full of bad characters, dumb mid-2000s thriller cliches like bad jump scares and pointless red herrings, and of course the absolute pits of awfulness, the psychology behind the 'twist.' No, dumb mid-2000s thrillers – having multiple personalities doesn't make you a fucking serial killer. That was literally never a good twist. It's shit – it's the kind of thing a moron would write because he wants to get cheap shock-tactic scares from middle schoolers. It is garbage, sewer slime, just trash all around. It is about as scary as a Sunday School Bible reading session.

I mean, when has anyone in real life ever not realized they were a killer for that long? Sure, sometimes you get deluded psychopaths or whatever, but most of the movies that pull this shitty twist are just too pussy to actually make the main character aware of what he's doing. Make de Niro know he's a killer and just trying to hide it from the cops. Why not? Because you're afraid it'll be controversial? I mean, I can't see any other reason...surely you can't actually think you're being smart in what you did with this movie.

Surely not. Heh heh heh...

...that would be ridiculous.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Devil's Rejects (2005)

February is a time when you're supposed to be all thankful and mushy and shit about people you love. Sometimes, those people are serial killers and necrophiliacs. Don't judge them; that's just the way life works at times. They deserve love too.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

In a time when most movies are judged by the standards of people who have never raped someone's corpse, The Devil's Rejects came out to prove that, yes, deranged psychotics do deserve their own fair representation in cinema, just like all those other minority groups like black people, gay people and transgender people. We have to move toward a broader and more open-minded environment for everyone. And that's why I do this blog. To promote open mindedness! Yup...not takin' it back at all...

We start this off with a corpse dragged through the woods, which I think is kind of the equivalent of a "Beware of Dog" sign for any movie. If you can't handle this, well, you better go the fuck back to watching James Wan movies, I guess. Or whatever you're into. I don't discriminate on these things.

I'm undecided on whether not being able to handle this is good or not.

We then get the Firefly family, who are not a happy-go-lucky band of space travelers, but instead a gang of psychotic killers. They get raided by the police. During this, Mother Firefly tells her daughter Baby, played by Zombie's wife Sheri Moon, that she loves her and has been thinking about when Baby was...well, a baby. I guess that isn't too hard because of the name association.

But wait! We saw them earlier with a bunch of corpses in their beds! And anyone who knows the previous film House of 1,000 Corpses knows they're a bunch of evil sick psychos! How are we supposed to be drawn into their familial affection for one another?

Wait, I know – it's because Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up. That's how we know we're watching art.

Mother Firefly is arrested, but Baby and her brother Otis, played by Bill Moseley, escape. Otis, for those not familiar with this movie already, is a truly sick puppy. He's the kind of guy you'd expect to see in the background of a Slipknot concert, smoking shitty cigarettes and drinking, I dunno, Pabst Blue Ribbon, or something. The kind of guy who'd be driving a truck with raised wheels and flames on the hood and would beat you up in the parking lot for looking at him wrong while your girlfriend watches, thinks you're kind of a pissant anyway and have been asking for this your whole life, and considers leaving you for her friend from work who wears just the right amount of Old Spice.

Maybe they'll run into the Duck Dynasty guys out here somewhere...that'd be a mercy killing for the world...

Yeah, something like that. On second thought, I could have said “guy you'd see at a Rob Zombie concert” and been that much more accurate, and taken up less words at that.

We also get introduced to images like this, which burn into your brain even more than the dead girl from earlier, because our society has fucked up priorities.

This is Captain Spaulding, a crazy clown who ran a gas station road sideshow in the last movie and in this one, well, I guess he just fends off the sexual horny advances of his equally-fat wife. I guess the best way to describe this character would be: he's the kind of dude you'd see at a gas station at 11 in the morning buying a 24 pack of beer and cigarettes even though he was just in there last night, too. Then maybe you find out he's got a box of hardcore bondage snuff porn out in the garage.

He finds out about the raid on the house and heads out to meet Otis and Baby, who we learn are his children in this movie. It is a small world – murderers beget other murderers. He steals a car from a mother and child, but not before threatening the kid to come up with a reason he thinks clowns are scary, or else he'll come back and kill the kid and his mother. What a fun clown quiz game.

"Gee, mister, I guess I'm scared of of clowns because they threaten to kill my family! At least that's what the pee running down my legs tells me right now."

Easiest quiz ever!

Meanwhile, Otis and Baby kidnap a traveling country band and their girlfriends to hide out in their motel room. Not wasting any time, they do the sensible thing and force one of the guys' wives to strip and then violate her with the barrel of a gun.

Which, I guess, was the most integral part of this scheme...

Seriously, though – this has to be one of the scariest scenes I've ever seen in a movie. This is real fucking horror. Bill Moseley in this scene, and most of the ones that follow, just delivers this amazingly fucked up performance and you are really just scared shitless the entire time, because he seems like he really fucking means it. Am I really praising a scene in which a woman is traumatized beyond repair like this? Eh, on second thought, might not be the first thing to bring up at a cocktail party when I'm discussing movies.

Otis takes the two country musicians out into the desert to dig up some guns, all the while quipping snarkily about how their taste in music isn't up to what he expected. Somehow I'm not surprised by this – I mean, this guy's head has to be kind of a trip, huh? Equal rage at the cops chasing him and at shitty pop country music. But to be fair, I do think those two things are about equal in any respect. So I can see where he's coming from.

The musicians get wise on him however and try to kill him, but that doesn't go so well. My favorite scene here is when Otis is standing over the older guy and forces him to start praying to God. Otis jokingly (?) acts like the wrath of God is about to come down buuuuuut then does a “Psyche!” moment and instead declares that he is the Devil, here to to the Devil's work.

Y'know, I am fucking astounded Otis has never been caught before or got the whole family caught before now. I mean, the guy just takes every opportunity to flaunt his absolute evil in any situation. I'm surprised he doesn't just go apeshit on some poor fuck at a grocery store. “What'd you say to me? WHAT'D YOU SAY? I AM THE DEVIL! BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!” “Uh, sir, I was just trying to go to my car! I didn't mean to bump into your grocery cart!” That's always a pain in the ass for the Firefly family because that's more blood they have to wash out of Otis's clothes.

But apparently in Rob Zombie's world, being a huge asshole psychopath just makes you invincible. Which really does explain a lot about his later work, come to think of it...

Anyway. Back at the motel, Baby makes the two women slap each other in order to allow one of them to go to the bathroom, which is either every basement dwelling Reddit user's fantasy, or a serial killer's methodology put into practice. Then one of the women grabs Baby's gun and points it at her, though there's no bullets. This is all just leading up to the best knife throwing scene in the movie:

Yup! I guess the knife just...somehow slipped through the Fourth Dimension and killed her despite the fact that you'd need to have Hulk-level strength to pierce the bones to that extent at that angle. I guess being the director's wife gives you superpowers.

Captain Spaulding finally gets there and Otis gets back with the younger country musician's face cut off, clearly having been in a Buffalo Bill-ish mood all day and needing to quench that thirst. They tie the one surviving girl up and then put the skinned face on her like the world's worst Halloween mask. Since the face is of her now-dead boyfriend, I guess you could argue they're just that much closer together now.

Not sure if I should put a trigger warning for this or not...nah, it's fine.

And yes, I did just make that joke. About a girl wearing her skinned boyfriend's face. I guess I really am going to Hell now. Hooray for desensitizing! The next morning, the maid finds a nice morning wake-up call:

"Eh, I've seen worse. This isn't nearly as bad as when the Rolling Stones stayed at this motel."

The one surviving girl with the dead skin mask runs out into the street and is immediately hit by a truck. We then get a scene where the best of the best coroners looks at the body and gives his prognosis...

"Hmmm, yup, I think she might be dead."

The next scene is Baby, Otis and Spaulding in the car talking about getting ice cream. Otis doesn't want to, and they have a quibble over it, but a strategically placed scene cut awards them their sugary treat. Also in this scene we get the best line in the movie, an immortal utterance that will no doubt go down in the halls of history: when Baby and Captain Spaulding start chanting “Tutti fuckin' Frutti!” over and over again. Don't believe me? Just look:

Baskin Robbins: Perfect for an after-murder snack.

We also get scenes of Sheriff Wydell, the deranged maniac cop whose brother was killed by the Firefly family in the first movie. Given this clear conflict of interest, it makes perfect sense that he'd be the main one leading the case. While he's "interviewing" Mother Firefly, the other cops even hear him talking about his dead brother and hear her talking about killing his brother, and never once do they even suspect that Wydell might not be in the best place mentally to be on this fucking case.

"Nah, he's okay. Hell, just let him take her home and keep her prisoner in his house where nobody is looking. We don't have any legal responsibility here after all."

I guess it's easy to be a cop when your only alternative otherwise was crowd control at a fucking Shania Twain concert on a Thursday night. I mean, I guess that was the only other option for these bungholes.

But I dunno, it might be okay in the end. I mean, it isn't like he's hiring hitmen to go after them or something crazy like that...

Hey, it's Danny Trejo!

Err. Uh. Let's just move on.

The next few scenes are really just the movie going deeper into its hole. We've seen the Devil's Rejects do their thing and we've seen Sheriff Wydell's slow descent into madness. Now I guess we just have to watch that scene where Wydell realizes that all of the Firefly family's names are actually just pseudonyms stolen from old Marx Brothers films. To help him solve this mystery, he calls in a movie critic who I'm pretty sure has had sexual thoughts about his mother. I mean, holy Gods, that fucking mustache.

I'm also just now realizing after all these years that the entire plot about their names being stolen from Marx Brothers movies is completely insane. I mean, do these serial killers really seem like the types to watch Marx Brothers movies religiously? Maybe they should have taken their names from Larry the Cable Guy specials or some shit.

They get into an argument about Elvis Presley, which ends in Wydell threatening to murder the critic if he ever says anything bad about Elvis again. Gee, he sure does care about Elvis Presley's reputation just as much as he cares about catching the psychopaths who killed his brother! I mean he gets mad at them both in the same way. But fuck it, he's still the best man to solve this case! Conflict of interest? No problem! Murderous rage at small things that suggest he might have a meltdown soon? Not even a blip on the radar of concerns!

I mean, he could probably kill a prisoner at this point and still nobody would bat an eye!

It happens. I mean, being the sheriff is a stressful job and shit.

Oh...oh, well, okay then. I guess that was a stupid thing to say. Killing the prisoners is okay so long as you have a good reason. Like, if you just don't like them, or if they say something that annoys you. That's some good old fashion deep fried Southern justice.

The Firefly family, meanwhile, is busy meeting up with two other Rob Zombie trademarks: a Ken Foree cameo who runs a brothel. Yes! Good job. Everyone in the world is either a murderer or a prostitute. There are no other options. Rob Zombie, you truly are a humanitarian.

Otis, Baby and Spaulding start having a pretty good time, and we get some scenes of them partying. However, it turns out Ken Foree's character was actually just a dick the whole time who sold them out to Wydell and his hitmen goons. In this movie about murderers, rapists and corpsefuckers, I'm just shocked one of them was a big ol' Judas. Shocked!

This short scene reminds me of how good parts of this can be underneath all the filth and violence. It's a genuinely dramatic scene and a real tense moment where Haig shows so much in that look without even saying a word.

So they get taken back to their old house and tortured for a while. One of the best parts of this sequence is when they're trying to take the blame for one another and save each other from Wydell. Like there's one bit where Wydell asks who killed one of the dead cheerleaders found in their house, and they all shout at him that they individually did it, to keep the others from further punishment. That's...the most oddly sweet defense of violent rape and murder I've ever seen. And yes, I too am amazed I just wrote that.

We also get a scene where Wydell chases Baby through the dark like a hunter...you know, like in a normal slasher movie, this scene would be the killer chasing the normal, straight-man character. But here it's the other way.

And you sorta feel sorry for Wydell too - when he shouts at her about "how do you feel being helpless and tortured?" he does have a point.

Personally I think this is a pretty normal occurrence. I mean, he's just trying to do his job. What's a little murder and cold drunken vengeance if he gets the job done, after all and catches the bad guys? That's what our tax dollars are going toward, after all.

Then Tiny, the misshapen freak giant of the family who I forgot to mention throughout the rest of this because he wasn't in it (which should be his acronym-name frankly), kills Wydell and helps them all escape. There are also some pictures of them just having fun and being happy from the past, and I think it's good that they have this great collection of home movies. I wonder how that's organized..."oh, here's the tape of us torturing that hitchhiker! And then there's one of Baby's 18th birthday party where we went to Red Lobster!"

...nope, just as pants-shittingly scary as when they were actually killing people.

The last scene is our three vile murderers riding off into a bright sunny day, “Free Bird” playing while the cops shoot the shit out of them and kill them. Which is exactly what Lynyrd Skynyrd had in mind when they recorded that song. It's perfect musical synchronicity.

So that's The Devil's Rejects. It's got zero moral character or bright spots to it. It's just a dark, fucked up trip with lots of gore and violence. I mean, fuck it, right? It's offensive to good taste and completely morbid and pitch black, and that's why it's a hoot to watch. Obviously those things don't work without a certain kind of nuance to the writing, but the movie makes it work with some dark comedic timing and some very wryly funny moments, as well as some of the scariest scenes in modern horror anywhere. They even fit in a few dramatic moments here and there. It's tasteless as fuck and some people just won't like it, but what movie is so bland that anyone could like it? The phrase "anyone can like it" usually isn't much of a compliment when you think about it.

The difference between this and the very average House of 1,000 Corpses, or the awful Halloween remakes, is that here, Zombie finally hit the sweet spot he wanted to. He humanizes these characters. No, they're still not quite likable in a traditional way – they do too many horrible things to really call them the protagonists, but I don't really think this is the type of story that needs a protagonist. It's a bunch of awful, evil, vile killers meeting their match and getting a bit of what they dished out for years at the hand of another vengeful psychopath. It's a pretty cool deconstruction of the usual slasher movie tropes.

Even taking that away though, this is probably one of the most realistic serial killer movies ever made that wasn't based on a real life story. While, yes, this is rather sensationalistic in the amount of crimes the Firefly family has committed without being caught, and yes, they are a bit too powerful – it's not just like they're bogeymen like in a Friday the 13th movie. They do horrible things but they also interact with one another like normal human beings at other times (albeit extremely profanity-laden normal human beings), and they have a certain underlying sense of community with one another. It's funny and a bit poignant, and pushes your buttons because then you remember the heinous things these characters did in the first act of the movie.

I don't really know if Zombie intended that, though. I mean, have you seen his other movies? I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't mean to do any of that and was really just kinda fucking with the audience. So was this an unholy accident of a film; fated to be more than its creator ever intended it to be? Fuck it, I dunno. Just go watch the Tutti fuckin' Frutti scene again.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Nun (2005)

A horror movie about an undead ghost nun killing people. If that isn't the worst idea you've heard all month, I'm really quite afraid to ask what could possibly be less dignified, scary or interesting.

Director: Luis de la Madrid

Starring: Anita Briem, Manu Fallola

IMDb

This review is a personal thing for me. I rented this movie years and years ago and tried to watch it twice, failing both times to even make it halfway through. In the course of doing this I also ruined the rental DVD case the movie came in – by water, nonetheless; which is how the killer in the movie kills its victims, which makes this whole thing extra poetic. It was as if the movie was cursed, and I was the unwitting victim of that curse. Eventually, I gave up and decided never to touch its toxic exterior again.

Until now.

We start off with a bunch of girls at boarding school being taught by a nun who likes to shove paper in girls' mouths and turn into a horrific hell-demon in the middle of class. The second one is expected, but the shoving paper in their mouths is a bit much. Maybe someone ought to tell the head nun about this.

But it turns out that was just a dream. Next we get a party scene where a jackass with a camera talks to some people at a party about going to Spain for no reason other than to get killed by this movie's ludicrously over-thought and simultaneously under-written plot devices.

Why is he filming this? We clearly saw in the previous scene this guy had his own girlfriend he could've been spending time with, but I guess being a weirdo stalker is cool too.

Oh, did I spoil that last part? I'm so sorry. I just can't seem to get this review right. I just know you were all on the edge of your seat about whether or not they'd die in this horror movie.

So I guess tragedy strikes as main girl Eve's mom – the woman from the opening – has some serious plumbing problems as her sink is overflowing.

"I will find the Mushroom Kingdom down here if I flood my whole house doing it!"

Maybe she should reconsider using a plunger in the sink and instead just call the fucking plumber. But while she's doing that she should also call the exorcist – these are supernatural plumbing problems that mean a ghost nun is coming to kill her. 

"How are you taking me seeeerrrrriooooouuuuussssllllyyyyy?!?"

Man, if only she'd have just fixed the pipes when she had a chance, and then a watery nun-ghost wouldn't have been able to get in. That's really the #1 danger when it comes to pipes and plumbing.

Eve comes home and finds out that a clearly hungover cop tells her her mom committed suicide, even though Eve actually saw the nun ghost kill her and she slashed her throat, which isn't a very common way of doing that. But whatever. Investigation shmvestigation.

"Whatever...can I go back to drinking vodka in my car yet?"

At the funeral, Eve meets an older woman who says she knew Eve's mom from a long time ago at boarding school. She talks about what's going on a little bit, but later on I guess the ghost nun didn't like that, because she also gets plumbing problems, followed by a swift arm-decapitation by elevator. Well I dunno about you, but this was the kind of kill I expected when coming into this movie about a ghost nun.

What? It's not weird at all!

Eve and her friends go to Spain because why wouldn't you after a horrific death in your family that left you an orphan? It just seems the most logical. I also love how the friend is constantly so flippant about Eve's mom dying – she continually tells her to cheer up, wonders why she's acting kind of weird, etc. Jesus. With friends like this who even NEEDS a phantasmagorical watery ghost-nun killing off everyone you know? I mean they're kinda one in the same.

"I know your mom just died, but cheer up, we're on a vacation to Spain!" Also I just realized they don't even do anything there besides the plot of the movie. What was their plan? Go to Spain and just stare at the walls of their hotel room? Good thing Eve's mom died and gave them a mission, then.

Then we get a scene at the library where Eve is researching the old boarding school. Some doofy looking dude who says he's training to be a priest comes up and offers to translate it all for her. She says yes and then later on he meets them at some night club to give it back to her. They bond over the fact that he killed his last girlfriend by running her over with a car. Yes, really. I guess that's just what Eve is into. I don't even have to make jokes here – the movie itself is just one big punchline. How did anyone keep a straight face when working on this? I know I fucking couldn't.

I mean, when you really get down to it, this movie fails at even the most basic tenet of scary movies – setting an atmosphere in which to be scared later. It can't even get that right. Every kill scene starts off with the unsuspecting victim in the bathroom or kitchen when water starts filling up the sink, tub or whatever. When you really get down to it, as an adult, you aren't scared by this – you're just annoyed because in real life, you'd have to clean up all that overflowing, leaking water. How is the movie supposed to scare you when THAT'S the only reaction most of your audience will get out of it?

"Aw, dammit, now I have to clean all this up..."

They leave the club to go do their real passion, which of course is playing detective and finding dead bodies all over the place. They see the one lady's body and then immediately decide they can't call the cops, because there are still two more victims who don't know about the nun-ghost yet and they have to warn them. Uh, so how about calling the cops while you're going to warn the others? Nope, then we couldn't have a movie!

This whole 'not calling the cops' thing goes so far that Eve actually throws the other guy, Joel, out of the car for wanting to do so. Eve persuades Priest Boy that they shouldn't do it because 'she just wants to find our what happened to her mother.' So because you need to chase around some ridiculous story about an old boarding school, that woman's friends and family don't get to know what happened to her when she's lying dead on the floor of her own bathroom. You little asshole.

She also brings up the fact that they are a lot alike, as no one believes HER about the watery ghost-nun, just like no one believed HIM when he said he wasn't drinking when he killed his girlfriend. They really are like peas in a pod!

I also love the scene where Joel is just standing out there in the rain. “Wait! I forgot it was raining out here! Let me back in! No, I can't relent! I have to preserve my manhood and dignity! CURSE MY OWN IMPULSIVE DECISIONS!!!”

"Curse the heavens!"

They make it to the old boarding school and meet up with the other two stock characters who we haven't seen until now, so obviously they have a lot to contribute, by which I mean they only exist to shovel exposition in our faces like melting snow off a driveway in March. We learn that apparently back in their boarding school days, they came across the nun shooting a shower head up Eve's mom's vagina.

Never mind that this is a serious situation we could get her fired for; we need to re-enact I Know What You Did Last Summer!

As this is a horrific abusive situation, they accidentally kill her – you know, like you do.

Don't pretend you've never had a night end up this way...oh, wait, is it really only me and the girls in this movie? Weird.

They somehow haul her body outside without being noticed. Are they the only people in the entire fucking school? How did they not get caught? Then they dump her in the water outside.

"If she ever comes back to life as a ghost through our plumbing, we'll be ready...well, on second thought, that sounds really stupid."

Uh...wait a fuckin' second here. What happened next? How did no one notice she was dead? How did she never get found in that pool of water? Was it just a bottomless ocean made possible by the mystical powers of Christ to kill off his most odious of followers? Did the girls just get to go home when their teacher was missing the next day and never have to come back to Catholic school? “Oh, sorry girls, your teacher went missing mysteriously. I'm going to ignore the shifty-eyed, sweaty-faced looks you all have and just send you home. We won't be investigating the disappearance of that nun, either. Have a nice life forgetting all our dogmatic Catholic teachings!”

In the present day again, they go hunting through the old boarding house and find a bunch of paintings that they determine are actually the ways all their friends have been getting killed, because apparently nun ghosts really like to base their killings off of old paintings in boarding schools that no one can see.

And yeah, really; hands decapitated by an elevator sure was an easy thing for those classical psychic prophets to paint back in the day when elevators didn't exist. What a bunch of geniuses they must have been.

Also, to up the stupidity from “eating paint chips while smoking dirt-weed and watching Kim Kardashian videos” to “permanent cranial damage,” we also see that apparently the nun put up a portrait of how to kill her – a harpoon through the heart. I guess she forgot to take that one down in the incredibly rare occasion someone comes in there looking for clues on what's going on, huh?

One of the two women from the boarding school sees that her painting is being decapitated. So logically she locks herself in a room away from everyone else and then somehow, through an overly long sequence, gets her head lopped off by a broken glass door.

That looks like a baby with vampire teeth dressed up in grandma's old nun habit. What the hell am I even supposed to be watching?

We get some flashbacks which reveal Eve's mom had sex with a priest named Miguel, which is why that nun was trying to wash out her ovaries like your dad washing your car for you on Thanksgiving weekend home from college. Because you know how the Catholic Church feels about abortions. They love 'em!

Isn't this like being against gun control by eviscerating gun-control-proponents with a Bowie knife?

Then somehow they flood the place, apparently because that's the only way the nun can't kill them. Even though she apparently comes from water to kill people, having a whole room flooded apparently negates the entire thing and means she can't kill? Why not just go for complete abject randomness and say she can't kill people in rooms with three windows instead of two, or can't kill people on Tuesday nights while Glee reruns are on? Just stop even trying at all. We'll all be better for it.

They split up a bunch of times, which just seems to prove the characters have never watched a horror movie in their lives. If there was any logical reason for splitting up it'd be one thing, but no, really; they just leave one person behind when they go and do things for no reason but “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE IN RANDOM ROOMS FOR SCARES!”

A lot of other random, boring things happen, which lead up to the big twist of Eve being the real killer all along. Yes, apparently instead of the watery ghost-nun killing people, it was Eve being possessed by the nun. Which really doesn't make sense, because of...well, the entire fucking movie before this. Why try to shoehorn in a twist? Did you lose a bet? Did the previous writer die in a plane crash and so the director replaced him with an M. Night Shyamalan devotee?

Actually, really, even a Shyamalan twist would be better than this. At least his are entertaining in that you have no idea what the fuck he was thinking. This is just the kind of “the main character was the killer all along, ooooooh!” crap that you'd get in a Freshman writing class.

There was no logic here – from the idiotic plot to the acting, which was made up of a bunch of exaggerated Spanish accents and all the actors seeming like they were confused at all times. Which doesn't surprise me at all given this movie's abysmal script-writing. All in all, I learned from this movie that plumbing is serious business, and if you don't fix your bathroom or sink pipes, a vengeful ghost of someone you killed will come back and kill your mom's friends. Yeah, that about sums it up.

I also am grateful to finally be able to finally put to rest my curiosities about The Nun, which I started many years ago and never finished. Now I'm kinda just wondering, honestly, why I bothered renting this in the first place all those years ago. Was I just a serious masochist back then? I guess that would explain how I turned out the way I am today; watching these movies and so desensitized nothing in them even remotely surprises me anymore. Such is life.

Eh, whatever. This sums up my opinion on the movie:



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