All Hallows Eve (2013)

All Hallows Eve is a 2013 horror movie that I had never heard of until I bought it at the Spooky Empire convention last year. I then watched it when I got home and it was one of the scariest fucking things I’ve ever seen. Here’s a review of it.

Director: Damian Leone

Starring: Katie McGuire, Mike Giannelli

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a sick fucking movie, and I mean that in a literal sense… the thing is that it really doesn’t do anything terribly different from the generic horror movies you’ve seen a hundred times, but just does things in a more depraved manner. It’s an anthology story with a wrap-around about a babysitter watching two kids on Halloween night – you could easily get the impression it’s just a straight rip-off.

But then they find a weird unmarked video tape – not a DVD, a video tape, because I guess the sick perverts of this town are not up to date with things. Or maybe just every time you need a haunted media in a horror movie, it’s something old. A haunted iPod or DVD doesn’t have the same resonance. And a haunted mp3 file? Fucking forget it.

The tape has a bunch of shorter movies on it, which the babysitter, after some hemming and hawing that ultimately goes nowhere, agrees to let them watch. You’ll start to see how amazing that really is when you see the fucked up shit on these stories – though the kids keep claiming they’ve seen “much worse stuff” on the internet. I guess they’re busy scouring the Dark Web for snuff videos or something.

The first story is about a girl who is sitting alone in a train station when a clown approaches her, initially seeming annoying but harmless, like any weird asshole you see on a train. But then things get weird when he pulls out a syringe and sticks her with it, kidnapping her – right there, it’s already fucked up.

Is he medically licensed to do this?

She wakes up in a dungeon with two other women, all of them chained up by their necks. They wander around a bit, often hysterical – it’s weird how the main girl is suddenly brave and badass. Earlier, she was scared of a cockroach she saw.

Then they find what I can only describe as what conservatives think Planned Parenthood is:

"THIS is what's happening to YOUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS when they even GO NEAR a Planned Parenthood!!!"

I guess it ends with the devil raping the main girl – surprise, happy ending! I’m glad that babysitter let these kids watch this…

To be fair, she does finally make them stop watching it. The little boy she’s babysitting throws a tantrum over it but eventually relents. Then she goes back and watches it by herself with a glass of wine – choosing this over Night of the Living Dead by the way. Yeah, I’d also choose a creepy random video someone slipped in a child’s Halloween bag that could be a real-life snuff torture movie over a horror classic. I understand her.

The next story is about a woman alone in a house at night, talking on the phone with her friend about her boyfriend, who randomly woke up in the middle of the night and painted a horrific nightmare painting that he doesn’t actually remember. I love how they just talk about this like it’s normal, never really spending much time on it. You know how those artists are! They’re fucking idiots, right? Just painting stuff they don’t remember…

Anyway, that’s not even really what this story is about – it’s actually about an alien that looks like a child’s drawing come to life stalking her in the dark. As silly as this thing looks, I have to admit, I actually find it pretty creepy to look at. It’s just…eerie.

Just something about that big face and those dead, expressionless eyes.

The boyfriend eventually gets on the phone and tells her to call the cops – but she’s a black woman, so justifiably, she’s afraid the cops will shoot her in her own house, and doesn’t call them.

Instead, the alien ends up dragging her away, probably just to throw her a party, I dunno, I'm naive and have never seen a horror movie. I’d say this probably goes on too long for its own good, but even then I still like it – there’s something dark and hopeless about this story that I don’t get from other, similar ones.

Finally we get the last story, and this is the one I was actively kind of avoiding watching again – it's the most gruesome and gross one by far. I haven't really had a reaction like that to a horror movie in, well, maybe ever, just to illustrate that.

It’s basically a pretty straightforward old horror tale of a young woman alone at night running into the killer clown from earlier. She stops at a gas station where she finds out from the one dude working there that a clown has shit and pissed all over the walls of his bathroom – you know, the old clown trick book in play. He gets run off, and the guy is trying to help the woman find her way back to the highway when he gets distracted by some loud noises. And really, aren't you guys tired of non-vegetarian clowns? I am. I sure fucking am.

End the mutilating of gas station attendants! Eat at your local vegan coffee shop!

From here it just gets more and more depraved – there’s a fairly routine chase scene made creepier by the rawness of it. I guess the gritty looking, grainy camera style adds to it. And it’s just super uncomfortable and bleak at every turn, moreso than your garden variety Friday the 13th ripoff or whatever. She gets into a car with a stranger passing by, which, if you don’t know, is always, 100% of the time a bad idea in a horror movie. And like clockwork, the clown drives up to them and pulls out a random gun and kills him:

The clown is a licensed member of the NRA. He believes in the second amendment.

I don’t even know what it is with this scene. It’s so bizarre it’s almost comical that this fucking clown is using a gun – but nah, it doesn’t quite hit comical and stays weirdly menacing instead.

Then the car crashes in a horribly violent manner, but that isn’t even the worst part – the worst is what happens next, which is really so awful that I'd call it up there with the worst things I've seen on film, how this story ends for her. It's fictional, yeah, and they don't dwell on it much, but the visual is disconcerting to say the least - and to say what it really is, it's fucking horrific shit.

Back in the real world – or the wrap-around story – the babysitter tries to turn off the video, but it won't turn off, instead showing a mirror image of the babysitter standing in the living room, but with the clown behind her in the reflection. This, if you remember, was why they had to discontinue VHS tapes. It just wasn't working out with all the demonic clowns appearing in people's rooms.

Then, I shit you not, the clown appears in real life and kills the two kids she was babysitting. Wow! I wonder what she's gonna tell their parents! This clown has really put her in a pickle!

I am limiting the things I censor on this blog to one per post... sorry.

And that's the movie. Dead kids! Happy Halloween!

I don't even know what to say here. It's a sick, demented fucking movie and one of the scariest I've ever seen. It's just the way everything is done in this – it all feels super helpless and deranged, and the tone is as if it was made by a real life psychopath who was filming things he'd really done. It can be silly, sure, but I think the silliness just accentuates how depraved it truly is, as everything has that diabolical, dark air to it even when you're giggling. Every second of this is uncomfortable as fuck and deeply disturbing.

I don't even really know if I like the movie. It's that fucked up. But it did work as a horror film - they're supposed to effect the viewer, which this one did. So I can at least say that much. It is an unavoidable thing once you've seen this film - it will stay with you.

So with that said, I recommend it if you want something to watch this Halloween.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Snowpiercer is a movie about a dystopian future, which means it's full of buckets and buckets of important social commentary and symbolism! We should really listen to this movie, because it's Important with a capital I!

Director: Joon Ho Bong

Starring: Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, Ed Harris

IMDb

The movie begins with a bunch of poor, dirty looking people in rags living in the back of a giant train circling the wasted frozen carcass of the world forever. Boy, this gritty Thomas the Tank Engine reboot really isn't pulling any punches.

"My life is an endless train of misery..."

Our main character is Curtis, played by Captain America himself, Chris Evans, modeling for the 2013 Hobo Winter Catalog. He lives in the poor part of the train, apparently planning some kind of revolution, or something like that. In his spare time, he likes to try to negotiate with small children for food and he fails even at that. So this is truly a man I can get behind as the leader of a revolution.

"I'll give you five peanut shells and two mosquito wings for it!"

It turns out the police in this brutal train world are stealing the poor peoples' children from them for an unknown reason. One guy SURPRISINGLY has an issue with that, and tries to assault the main lady by throwing a shoe at her. They capture him and force him to stick his arm out the window into the freezing sub-zero weather, and then break his arm off. The crazy lady puts a shoe on the guy's head and delivers a terrible, annoying speech about how the poor exist to be stepped on and should be kept in their places. Wow, what a thinking man's movie this is. It's like the Hunger Games if it were told by a really angry teenager.

This whole time, they basically only haven't made a move because it's convenient for the script. Curtis, in all his wisdom, just keeps saying it's "not time" yet to make a move. Well, I guess their children getting kidnapped was enough incentive for them to finally make a fucking move, because they finally do. Glad you guys are so proactive! They figure out that apparently none of the guards who have been coming in have had bullets for some time now. They deduce that by saying that they've never seen them fire those guns. Well, good enough for me!

Next, they find this pair of badass Asian people who for some reason have been locked away in drawers for some time now. Naturally, given how they've been basically in hibernation for a while, the Asians prove formidable foes for Curtis and the others in the pointless fight scene that comes next. I sure am looking forward to the movie about the characters who have trouble beating up people who have been comatose in boxes for months. They also force Curtis to pay them in hallucinogenic drugs for their services, which, to be fair, is a pretty fucking good deal. That's the only way I'd hang out with this raggedy crowd.

I'm not sure why the bad guys they fight up next are dressed as ninjas. What on earth do you need ninja costumes for just to stand around guarding people on a train? What are you trying to blend in with by wearing those?

ISIS Junior Squad, at your service!

There's one part where they go into a classroom being taught by a woman who acts like a cartoon character. She has them reciting creepy cult-like chants about how the poor are all dogs and praising the holy hell out of the mysterious man who made the train. This whole sequence is about as entertaining as a pro-life protester outside an abortion clinic waving a bloody fetus picture in your face.

The dead soulless eyes, the vacant smile...yup, she does look like a pro-lifer.

Then we get a speech by Curtis detailing how awful it was living in the poor part of the train at first. He spins this whole dramatic story about how they had to start eating the weak, and how babies tasted the best. I think this speech really nails down what I hate about the movie, so bear with me here, I'm going to break character.

This whole scene is just so emotionally manipulative and trite. It's so over the top. They ate babies! They were killing mothers to steal their babies and eat them! Fuck off. My point is, every time a critic bashes an action movie, they get shit on for only wanting serious art house films or really depressing films, or whatever the strawman is. “Can't you just have FUN?” the detractors inquire. But movies like this, actual action movies, too often have these very serious overtones and overly grim, gratuitous parts. Lots of movies have some serious plot threads, that's how they keep you engaged – it isn't just something that French art house movies about postpartum depression made on shoestring budgets do or again, whatever the strawman is.

Snowpiercer's serious elements really want you to take away the pain and sorrow and unfairness of the way the poor people were treated. But it's so bad here. It's done in such a piss poor manner, with no subtlety or shade or nuance. They just shove it in your face. That would be fine if all this wanted to be was a loud, brutal action movie – but this very clearly wants to be a super grim social commentary and it wants you to take it seriously. You kinda need more complex writing if you want to do that. It's not really an optional thing.

This movie's only manner of getting you invested is to throw stories about dead babies at you. So, yeah, if I'm in the mood for horrifically depressing stories about bad things happening, I think I will take the pretentious indie arthouse flick next time. At least if my only other choice is Snowpiercer.

But I digress. They then immediately find the place where the Big Bad is, like right after that, because the script was getting long and they couldn't think of any more dead baby stories to tell. We find out that the man behind the curtain in this is actually Ed Harris with some 5 o'clock shadow going on, so they probably just dragged him out of his house while he was still groggy drinking his morning coffee, and just threw him on the set.

He just goes on and on for like fifteen fucking minutes about how it's necessary to keep everyone in their place on the train and everyone has to stay in their place. He says they have staged revolutions before and Curtis's was just one more to keep people in their place, because chaos needs to exist for people to be normal! Well, after even a moment of thought, that makes no sense. Ask the people in Brussels how well that chaos is helping them live normally. I guess I get what they were trying to say, but it comes off a bit weird to say the least...

He then gives Curtis the choice to choose whether or not to keep the train running. I don't know why he does this, maybe just because he's bored for shits and giggles. He says it's Curtis's destiny now, and he can either stop the train or keep it going by feeding it children from the poor section – yes, THAT'S why they were taking the kids in the beginning of the movie. I guess the movie wasn't quite out of dead baby stories yet. You know, those are the only way to have a deep story! Dead kids!

Then the movie ends in a true fitting fashion for such a thought provoking picture: Curtis beats the shit out of Ed Harris with his bare hands like a caveman. Yes. That really drives the point home: Ed Harris is bad. I think we've learned a lesson here.

Would've been better with the Captain America shield in the shot. You really missed that opportunity, you dumb movie, you.

The visuals are pretty good as the train comes off its tracks. So there is that. They crash land in some snowy mountainside, and I'm guessing most of the people who survived are just mad Curtis couldn't wait until they passed by the sunny tropics to crash the train.

I know the feeling.

Honestly, this movie sucks. It's just not a good story. While I liked the action and some of the visuals were nice, the writing was just terrible. Everything was suffocatingly grim and over the top, and the message conveyed was delivered in a clunky, cloying and overly obvious manner that left very little to the imagination. I can see this film was trying to do something a little different and I can appreciate that, but it just doesn't have the depth of writing or script needed to be really smart. Instead, it just comes off as grandiloquent, self-serving, huffing and puffing crap stuck up its own ass with how smart it thinks it is.

I just think this is telling about what the action movie genre's big problems are. You get movies like this and John Wick touted as these really great, serious new action movies, and it's a blurry line, because neither one is really that bad – they both have their moments. But the writing for both is just so shallow. There are very few relatable characters, very little of anything compelling or intriguing about the way these themes pushed forward. Both movies are as deep as kids' wading pools in a shitty hotel, littered with used condoms and beer cans. But people accepted them just because they were better than Michael Bay Transformers crap and something alternative to Marvel. Even though they aren't really that great.

I'm NOT saying these movies have to divert from the action to show us long artsy sequences of the characters' relationships or something. By all means, give us some great, high energy action scenes! More really good ones would be a plus! But if you're making these fucking dark, brooding, serious films, that frankly do carry themselves with the pretense of a social message or trying to be a “thinking man's movie,” then I think I'm in the right to expect some kind of quality writing or storytelling. Or are writing and storytelling arbitrary tools of the upper echelon bourgeoise, only for pretentious dickwads who hate fun? I dunno. Maybe they are, then.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013)

The first Haunting in Connecticut movie was passable for an idiotic movie about ghosts. But then they decided to go and make a sequel, called The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. Literally any other movie could have been fine with that subtitle, but did you have to keep the Connecticut part? Why was this a sequel to Haunting in Connecticut? Was someone asleep when that title was green-lit? I was so fascinated by the insane brain mash of the title that I just had to check this movie out. That turned out to be a bad idea, because the lack of ideas in the title is reflected in the rest of the movie.

Director: Tom Elkins

Starring: Abigail Spencer, Chad Michael Murray

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you haven't seen the first movie, don't worry – just watch The Conjuring, and you'll know everything you need to know.

We start this one off with a woman sitting on a bed with a blank look on her face, popping back prescription pills like they're fucking candy. So, the audience for the movie.

Funny - that's how most look after FINISHING one of these films, not at the start!

This is actually our main character, though, and the movie decided to go instant cliché route by having her be some kind of pill addict, and so that's the reason nobody believes her! Plus, as an added lazy contrivance, it gives them plenty of hack-ass dialogue they can throw in about how she needs to get her shit straight! So they don't even have to try to make a likable or interesting character. This is all they need – the pill addiction. Fucking brilliant, I say.

She and her daughter, a blonde doll of a child with zero personality of her own, are going to move to some cabin out in the woods, or rather, a picturesque place only ever used for greeting cards and commercials that want to look all fake-folksy. Her husband is of course a Southern redneck cop, which means he looks like a magazine cover model who's never stepped outside in his life.

That little girl just realized what movie she's in. Poor thing.

Seriously, why do characters in these movies all look like they just came off a production line, airbrushed and blow-dried to perfection? That guy is supposed to be a police officer. But he looks like he spent his whole life to now locked in a room and never seeing the outside world, bred like some kind of show dog. I hate to break it to you, movie, but real rednecks look more like this very topical reference:

Am I trending yet? Sweet.

The story is full of cliché garbage, like the little girl and the mother constantly seeing ghosts that make the screen go all flickery and spastic, flashing to sepia tone or black and white for a few seconds. Because you know, it's only scary if the directing style reminds you of a bug light losing its power. Oh, and they all constantly pretend nothing is going on – they're just seeing things. At least, they do at first, until the police officer boyfriend finds a bunch of old coins buried in the ground that really prove it!

Yeah, apparently the whole thing is about them uncovering this historical mystery at the house they're at. The little girl keeps seeing the ghost of this old man named Mr. Gordy, who she seems afraid of. Logically, this means they don't fucking do a goddamned thing to take her away from there. Instead they just try to solve the mystery, even printing out a bunch of pictures and getting her to point out the one who she recognizes. Brace yourselves, the asshole detectives are on the case!

But hey, it's cool, they buy her a dog. So now everything's peachy.

The rest of the first act is taken up entirely by scenes of the mom and her redheaded hot sister, or whoever that's supposed to be, arguing about their past and whether or not the mom is abusing the pills like THEIR mom did before them. Since these characters are about as well written as a child's kindergarten doodles of characters from a bad TV show, these scenes are, how to put it delicately, completely ineffectual drivel.

Things get more serious, though, when the little girl falls into a hole in the ground that looks to be part of some underground network of caves. Police Officer GQ Cover saves her, pretty easily actually, and with no danger. Ohh yeah, horror movies, keep bringing the fear and tension! Then we get a scene where they all loudly debate whether or not the ghost is real, because that's a conversation people apparently have in the warped backwards reality of Haunting in Connecticut 2. Sure, go ahead and talk about that instead of moving the obviously in-danger young girl to some place where she's safe. Or doing anything else that makes sense or is actually interesting.

And make sure to talk about it with her right there in the room, because that's the ticket to making everything better. Just start saving up for her therapy bills right now.

Yeah, seems safe enough, let's stick around this wonderful place longer! After all, in this housing market, how can you tell when you'd get an opportunity like this again?

It turns out, I guess, that the whole thing is happening because Mr. Gordy's grandfather was this guy called the Station Master who used to help slaves, and as the characters veeeeeeerrrryyyyyy sloooooooowwwwlllyyyyyy find out, he actually kidnapped some of them and used them as human taxidermy experiments. This was apparently based on a real story, but here it's really not given any weight or importance, instead used as a hollow vehicle for more dumb schizo camera cuts.

Almost nothing of worth happens at all in the long, boring “final battle climax” scene that happens over the next 25 minutes of the movie. I would have said the scene where the aunt lady gets supernaturally stuffed...

Don't worry, she's inexplicably fine after this! Not a scratch on her!

...but she doesn't even die from that. Because this is a cushy world where no bad things happen, and not a horror movie or anything ghoulish or nasty like that.

The movie goes through an extremely shitty final battle sequence full of the movie's most schizo freak out camerawork yet, because we really need to see more of that, right? It's just so fucking trite, really. It's poised as this big battle between good and evil, something out of a children's storybook. Which makes sense, because the whole movie is about as childish a horror movie as any I've ever seen. Just go back and play with your coloring books and action figures, Haunting in Connecticut 2.

Then we get a ridiculous happy ending where everyone is alive without a scratch on them, frolicking in the beautiful picturesque scenery of the lakeside log cabin in bright daylight, like something the Teletubbies would find a bit too kitsch. Could you possibly wimp out any more, movie? We do get a scene of Mr. Gordy again, who it turns out was a good ghost, pushing the little girl on her bike! I'm so glad she's okay at least. And that now she knows the truth that there was nothing worse that ever happened to the slaves, before or after the historical events talked about in this movie.

Just wait until history class in a few years!

If AIDS cells could make a movie, this would be it. What hack work this is. There was nothing good or even tolerable about this movie, and it managed to be worse than most other movies exactly like this (The Conjuring, Dead Silence, any other James Wan-related movie) just out of sheer incompetency and ineptitude at telling a story. There's just so little self awareness about this, so little risk taken or interesting choices done with this story. Even if you like generic horror, it's rote, seen-it-before trash, charmless, gutless and witless. Fuck this movie.

Welcome to 2016, guys!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

You're Next (2013)

As the holidays is a time for sitting around a table with people you're not sure you like, I figured I'd take a crack at one of the movies that shows exactly what it's like to sit at a table with people you hate and then die from an arrow to the throat. You know, like you do. This is You're Next.

Director: Adam Wingard

Starring: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci

IMDb

Co-written with Colin.

This is apparently a part of a new subgenre called “mumblegore,” which I can only imagine is referring to the endless mumbling every single character has in place of real dialogue. As You're Next doesn't have much mumbling and instead just has regular, shitty dialogue, I have to say this is a bad example of mumblegore. Then again I might have the wrong definition of what mumblegore is. But I'm always right, so I doubt that.

I rated this movie the worst of 2013 back on my list for that year. It was nearly unwatchable when I didn't know what to expect. But now that I know to set my expectations lower than the water level of Florida for this, I don't have the same frothing hatred for it. Plus I teamed up with Cinema Freaks alum and sometimes-contributor The Observer for this, like old times, so it was a little better that way.

The movie begins with a scene of characters we don't know fucking. As an added bonus of worthlessness, they aren't the main characters, and we don't know their names and never see them again. But the opening does provide us with one of the staples of any erotic porno: the erotic orange juice pouring scene!

Scandalous.

Anyway, they're killed off, and we then move on to our main annoyances – a bunch of people meeting up at this big house for their parents' anniversary dinner. The mother and father get there first and things are already weird. Like all good horror movies, there's a pointless and dragged out scene where the father searches upstairs for the source of a mysterious noise that scared the mother, only to find out it was his weenie of a son Crispian rummaging around up there.

"Hey Dad, I know how much you liked being jump scared, so of course I had to do it this way!"

Red herring, awesome! How did Crispian get up there without them seeing him come in downstairs? Did he scale up the wall like Spider-Man? Was there a secret passage in this house? I mean, it does kind of look like the house from the Clue board games.

The main character is Erin, an Australian girl who's dating Crispian. They lay around later and spew soulless exposition to lay out the very easy story – their parents are having an anniversary and all Crispian's siblings are coming the next day. That's really the only reason to film this scene, to info-dump that on us. Uh, great job? I think you should go back to just mumbling everything, movie.

The family gets there, and it's basically all downhill from there. They argue over silly things like how unprofessional it is for Crispian, a teacher, to date Erin, who used to be one of his students. His brother is a real dick about it and they erupt into a full scale battle over it immediately, ruining their parents' anniversary like champs!

Fortunately, the parents were used to their children being insufferable morons.

As that apparently was enough character development to last an entire film, we're just done with all that shit now, and it's time for people to start dying. A bunch of unknown killers start shooting arrows into the house, which is frankly a blessing in disguise for these miserable people. They kill a few people, and the survivors huddle together and attempt to plan a way out. One of the girls volunteers, saying she's a very fast runner, but then she runs in stupid slow-mo cam and gets hit by barbed wire in the neck the second she opens the doors!

That isn't a camera trick - she just runs really slow and lies about being fast.

So it was a terrible idea, but at least that scene was pretty funny. So there was that. There's another killer waiting under the bed, who stabs the mom. He was apparently there for quite some time, and he still can't kill the rest of them. I guess it's just more conveniently dramatic that he did it this way. Of course no one else finds him and there's nothing that comes of this aside from the mom's death. What, did you want something actually interesting to happen? Pfft.

But to be fair, we DID need a hokey title drop scene!

The next thirty-odd minutes is just them scampering around in the house and sometimes dying. The fact that the characters wear animal masks really is pretty dumb. Somehow, Jason Voorhees always came off as somewhat menacing, but these guys are just clowns. There's no mystique, even before you get to the twist later. It just looks like the killers were lazy and had no imagination, so they grabbed the worst, cheapest masks at Party City.

It's revealed somewhere in the middle of all this that the main girl Erin was actually a child of a survivalist who learned how to fight and survive attacks just like this as a child. It's kind of glossed over, but the idea of a kid growing up in that environment is actually pretty cool. I certainly would have liked to see that instead of the movie we ended up getting!

Seriously, though, it's really just shoehorned in there because they needed SOMEONE to fight back, or else we'd have no movie! It's like “hey, we can't just have them kill everyone off, the movie will be over in ten minutes.” “Okay, whatever, throw in a survivalist character. Make her a hot chick, too.” Movie saved!

The best part (read: worst part) of this is that she didn't tell her boyfriend Crispian yet, for no reason other than that it would conflict with the plot twist of him being a killer later, and if he'd known she was a badass fighter, he never would have brought her, and we wouldn't have a fucking movie. Good writing! High five!

Then it's revealed, I guess, that the whole thing has been a plot by some of the family members to get their parents' inheritance money. You know how it goes, sometimes you're down on cash, and you need to stage an all-night-long murder fest in which everyone gets shot by arrows. Fucking please. There was no other way to enact this plan? You HAD to put on dumb animal masks and shoot everyone with arrows one by one? I guess poisoning their food or just hiring a guy to walk in with a gun would have been too much. But really they just didn't do those things because then there would have been no movie.

There's just no humanity to these characters, and no reason for them to act the way they do. I'm not saying we need a long exploration of their motivations, but what do we get instead of any development? A scene of the brother's goth girlfriend asking him to fuck her next to his mom's dead body on the bed? Yeah, I can see what they were going for now. I take it all back.

The rest of the movie doesn't even really try. It's full of dumpster-bin cliché like the henchmen thugs working themselves into a self-righteous lather when one of their own gets killed. HOW DARE YOU FIGHT BACK WHEN WE'RE TRYING TO KILL YOU!!! Maybe your job security isn't that good on this job after all!

The chase scenes are pretty goofy, too. One highlight for us was the guy who tries to step through a window. He sees the one row of nails on a wooden board, goes 'okay, I can do it,' and then steps down without even looking and impales his own foot on another nail. He then starts galumphing around and probably making it worse, because what horror movie has NOT been helped by comparisons to a Looney Tunes cartoon?

Just add the Roadrunner giving the audience a wink and it'll be gold.

Then there's the scene where Erin kills a guy with a blender, which totally is something she was taught in survivalist camp, I'm sure. That's just basic 101 stuff.

Oh, and the height of ridiculousness has to be when it's revealed that Crispian was a part of the whole thing, as the movie had kept him out of action for the last 40 minutes and made you wonder. He gives a very stupid, shitty speech in the most callous way possible about how he just wanted money so they could go on vacation, and c'maaaaaaaaahhhnnn, babe, don't you see why this was a good idea?! He really sounds like he's talking about not tipping a server at a restaurant, when he's actually saying he hired some guys to kill most of his family for money. It's just about the dumbest thing I've seen in the movie yet, which is no small feat.

"Hey, I'm a real catch, I killed my family so we could get some extra pocket money. On second thought, saying it out loud, maybe this was a bad idea. Man am I dead inside!"

So she kills Crispian, and then the cops come in and shoot Erin too, because I guess they hated having clean work performance records and wanted to be total fuck-ups. This scene was kinda like Night of the Living Dead, though! In...pretty much the only weird comparison to that classic flick that You're Next will ever draw.

This is a piss poor movie with nothing to recommend, frankly. Bad characters, no good scares, no atmosphere, and oh yeah, a tired home invasion plot with a weak twist at the end. There's really no exploration of the theme they seemed to be going for, this whole idea of a Great Gatsby-esque profane wealth, and what wealth does to people, makes them crazy and moral-less, et cetera. That seemed like the basic idea they wanted to get across. But instead, it was just a shitty home invasion movie, and you never really gleaned any point.

It's basically complete shit. Shame, because it seemed like it could have been good, based on the people involved, but I guess you can't win 'em all. Anyway, at least your holiday family dinners won't be as bad in comparison.

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

A Talking Cat!?! (2013)

It's time, dear readers, to take a break from our usual intake of gruesome horror tales, and instead look at something different. Something involving talking felines, and no dignity or common sense.

Director: David DeCoteau (as Mary Crawford)

Starring: Johnny Whitaker, Janis Peebles, Eric Roberts

IMDb

...yeah, I guess that's as good of an intro as I'm going to get. Boy, am I out of steam! It's almost like I'm doing these reviews and consciously mentioning how out of steam I am just to cover up how out of steam I am! And plus I'm reviewing a movie about a fucking talking cat. Which is, frankly, as low as you can go.

Apparently director David DeCoteau is something of a brainchild as he has done many other movies exactly like this. Some titles include A Talking Pony!?! and My Stepbrother is a Vampire!?! because it's apparently impossible to have a good title if you don't include !?! at the end of it. Am I right!?! No. No I'm not. I'm really just ashamed I just did that.

But really the most interesting part of this whole affair is this:

What? Seriously, what?

Oh well. This is mere chump change compared to the movie we're about to see. Are you ready? No? Well, nobody is ever going to be - not for this. We'll just have to get used to it.

The movie begins with our hero, Duffy, a talking cat whose mission is to help people. We get a voice-over in his head about, I dunno, walking around and shitting in peoples' yards or something. The voice-over by Eric Roberts of The Dark Knight and Heroes fame sounds like your drunk stepfather in a bar at 2 p.m.

He isn't the hero we want, but he's the hero we deserve. Also that looks nothing like the cat on the cover, goddamn you! Was it so hard to take a picture of the actual cat in your fucking movie?

He decides to help two separate families in “trouble.” By that I mean one of them has a dad played by a mordibly obese Bill Murray who likes to do soul-crushing things like sit down in the random car-shaped seat they have for some Godforsaken reason in their living room, and go “Vroom! Vroom!” like he's a 10 year old. The son, who is sitting on the couch reading what I am positive is a book of blank pages just intended to make him look smart, sighs exasperatedly and goes “Dad, why do you keep doing that?”

Did they steal that chair from a mall kids' play area display?

The story is told by the dad, Phil, who explains very calmly and actually kind of happily that he lost his job and will now just laze around the house all day. The son doesn't give a shit at all, and I guess that kind of dead-eyed apathy runs in the family – must be a dominant gene. Phil's apparent plan is just to hang around and eat pizza and stuff. I'm so glad he's a positive role model.

The son, Chris, by the way, is a total wimp who gets this really hot girl to come over and “study” with him, which for her means swimming in his pool while he reads her books for her. Kid, I'd tell you to skip this chick and wait for someone better, but to be honest, your totally wimpy reaction to this in which you run away from her like a pussy tells me you don't have it in you. I mean, come on – even the fucking cat is thinking he's terrible. Really; we get a voice over with the cat thinking how lame Chris is. That's pretty bad.

"How am I using a phone when I'm too stupid to even know how to operate one?"

The other family is a “poorer” family, which means they don't have a house that a hipster art college student would design while he was drunk. The daughter is trying to apply for business school, but the mom says they don't have money for that, and actively antagonizes the daughter for...trying to better herself as a human being and having ambition. Meanwhile, her lazy slacker son who just spends all day in his room and acts like a wooden plank, she loves and adores.

Hmm...so mommy has some issues which will likely be projected onto her weak-willed son. Sound familiar?

Nah.

So if you can actually believe it, the cat can talk to these people only once and tell them something they need to do or know to make their lives better. I'd say this is ridiculous and implausible, but frankly the audience for the movie – whoever the fuck they are – is already close enough to believing shit like this is possible. Whether through extremist hippie new-age belief or being dropped on their heads, the audience for A Talking Cat!?! will probably accept this plot without complaint.

Above: the look of all the legitimate movie studios when confronted with the plot for A Talking Cat!?!

I also love the animation for when his mouth moves, and by animation I of course mean they just photoshopped a black hole over the cat's mouth and had it move vaguely in tandem with the dialogue. Didn't I see this kind of stuff in 2002-era Internet animation cartoons? Why am I watching it in a 2014 movie?

Even old Newgrounds.com games had better graphics.

So I guess the cat gives them some really vague, weird advice – he tells Phil to “go take a walk in the woods.” Which honestly sounds kinda creepy, doesn't it? Is this cat some kind of mafia hitman enforcer? I dunno. Unless there's Ryan Gosling and a place beyond the pines involved here, taking a walk in the woods with anyone in this movie sounds like a terrible idea to me.

The only acceptable outcome of this movie for me.

He also tells the girl, Tina, to look at her computer, which has Phil's website on it. I guess Phil's job, which he lost recently, was something involving computer programming. Because this guy really looks and acts like a guy who knows anything about computers, right?

I guess the whole point of all this is when Phil takes his walk in the woods and meets up with Susan, the mom from the other family. They have a conversation about Humphrey Bogart movies, which I'm guessing is because the director didn't have the money to buy the rights to talk about anything else. I love Humphrey Bogart and all, but this whole sequence is hilarious to me. Yes, truly that is the barometer of quality here – Humphrey Bogart movies on one end and A Talking Cat!?! on the other.

Above: The face of the Humphrey Bogart fan club, circa 2013.

There's also a plot point, if you can call it that, about Susan being this caterer for business parties or something, and she's constantly trying to make cheese puffs to take with her. They talk about this a lot, to the point where my friends and I started to wonder if someone just lost a bet and had to shoehorn in the phrase “cheese puffs” in their script as many times as possible. I mean Jesus Christ, what is the big fucking deal with the cheese puffs? Are they really that good? Will they make you orgasm if you eat just one? Will they make you see beyond our puny reality and soar to the cosmos inside your mind while rainbows shoot out of your ass? I mean, you're setting the standards pre-etty fuckin' high here.

Apparently Susan wants Tina to make more cheese puffs instead of doing work to try and get into computer school. She really acts like a bitch to Tina for wanting to do stuff to try and get into a computer school instead of making cheese puffs – yeah, furthering your education and improving life prospects is lame. She should just be a docile house wife!

All women should be forced to stay in kitchens and make food all day with no other career prospects - A Talking Cat!?! says so, so it must be true.

Phil leaves and Tina goes with him to his house to make the cheese puffs while also talking about computers! They mash their fingers on the keyboards while smiling like a Hallmark commercial, so I guess that counts as the plot moving forward:

"Alright! You found my favorite animal porn website!"

The other son comes up and finds Chris trying to swim in the pool – because he apparently doesn't know how to swim when they clearly have a pool right there and the ocean is just a few miles away, too. I mean, I don't know; maybe there's some rational explanation. But given the movie's titanic levels of stupidity I'm guessing it's because Phil shrugged his shoulders, got that doofy look on his face and went “aw shucks, I ain't good at anything except computer science and embarrassing my entire family in public. You just won't be able to swim I guess!”

There's actual dialogue in this scene where Chris complains about being afraid of pool sharks - like, actual fucking sharks in the pool. Did he get dropped on his head?

So logically, the solution here is for the other son to offer to give Chris swimming lessons. Wait a minute, I thought the whole plot point of the other son was that he wasn't good at anything and didn't know what he wanted to do! But now he's really good at teaching people to swim and seems to enjoy that?! It's almost like the writers just didn't give a fucking shit what they were dribbling out onto the page at this point.

And then he was immediately eaten by a pool shark.

Susan comes over and gets mad at her kids for coming over there, even though they made the cheese puffs like she wanted. But that wasn't good enough because, apparently, in that short time span in which Tina left her house and came to Phil's, the mom had a meeting that went HORRIBLY because she didn't have the fucking cheese puffs! The horror! Stop the presses! So she takes it out on everyone else and ruins everyones' lives. Fuckin' A.

Then we get a montage of Phil and Chris scanning their clothes into a computer somehow, which I guess is Tina's newfangled computer system program or whatever. I dunno, since they figured this out and seem to know how it works, what's to stop them from stealing it for themselves and making even more money than they already have? Just trying to keep it real here, movie. Plus these characters being absolute irredeemable dicks to one another would just be funnier for me. And honestly, a fucking montage of this? Are you shitting me?! I've had more fun watching videos of people getting root canals.

Yes, continue to look absolutely baffled and bewildered at everything you're doing. That makes for a good character.

So I guess the cat thinks he can solve this “problem” by going over and talking to Susan, which he hasn't done yet. Unless what comes next is a suicide pact, then I'm not interested.

But unfortunately, the cat never makes it, after being hit by a car. Yes, really – that's now a plot point in this movie. Now, what I'm about to show you is a picture of the cat's injuries, and I understand that may disturb you. So if you're the type of person who is offended by gore and violence, especially against talking felines, I suggest you click the 'Back' button on your browser.

…

…

Have you done it yet? Because I'm serious. You're going to be disturbed by this.

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No, really. You will be. Last warning!

Okay then. Here are the injuries the cat sustains after the car accident:

Yup. Just one bandage on his head and that's all the injury he sustained from being HIT BY A FUCKING CAR.

Yes, my sentiments exactly.

You can't make this up, people! Hell, I can't even make jokes – the movie already is one! I guess either the cat has some aluminum plates in its skull after the war or the car that ran over him looked like this:

So I guess the cat somehow tells them that to save his life, they have to go out and find a buried collar in the woods. They go walking in the woods to a soundtrack of elevator music that sounds like it was made for a clown school, and find the collar above the ground, not buried like the cat said. Because why have anything make sense now? Who really cares about having a coherent script at all, right?

So although I was really hoping when they put the collar back on Duffy, it would magically transform him into his true form as the dark lord Lucifer, spewing hellfire and brimstone from his cracked lips and with the twisted horns atop his head that seem to be able to pierce the heavens...that doesn't happen. Instead it just magically heals him.

This is apparently what it looks like when a magical cat is healed. Also, good editing is when this happens and only one out of all those characters is looking up and appears to see it at all.

Well, that was A Talking Cat!?!. It was about as good as you would've expected from the title. I mean it isn't like you'd see the DVD cover and expect anything that much better. Christ. What was the thought process behind this? Who was the intended audience?

Oh. Well...okay then.

It isn't like Sharknado or something where it's intentionally bad...there was obviously passion in this and some kind of attempt to tell a story. But it's just incredibly backwards. The cat, for whatever fucking reason, is there to “help” people – so, obviously, he picks some really well-off middle class to rich people who have no real problems. Couldn't find a poor single mom on welfare or a high school drop out addicted to meth to help out, hmm? HMMMM?!

Well actually I'm guessing he tried, but really the only people fucking dumb enough to listen to a talking cat ended up being the characters we saw in this movie. That makes sense. And honestly the 'problems' these people have don't even seem that bad – they aren't that lonely, they seem to be doing decently financially...they have it pretty good, aside from the fact that they made some new friends at the end I guess. I guess that cat just wanted to freeload off them and not sleep in the gutter for a night.

Other than that though, this was pretty much okay. I mean, who doesn't want a movie full of long shots of nothing but nature or people driving?

These kinds of time-wasting shots take up a lot of the movie's runtime - it's pretty obvious they were just put there to pad out the rather meager 80 minute (even with these shots in there) runtime.

Who doesn't want a story with zero likable characters and dialogue more fitting of a bad 1980s commercial? Yes. I'm not going back on any of that.

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