Demons 2 (1986)

The first Demons was a gloriously insane little ride that was mostly about people spewing green stuff out of their mouths while heavy metal songs played over scenes of them all dying. This one is kind of like that, only without any of the things that made the first one good or even interesting. All the cool lighting and directing touches are gone, the music is less prominent and the kills are less interesting. Sound fun yet?

Director: Lamberto Bava

Starring: Bobby Rhodes, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, lots more

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

I guess this is a sort of weird ‘movie within a movie’ where you think you’re watching a story about a bunch of kids trespassing in the ruins of the movie theater from the first Demons and waking up a demon – it's weird that all five of them can't take one demon that was just asleep a second ago. I guess not everyone can be Ash from Evil Dead! It's just that these guys are like baby kittens completely helpless in the world. Pathetic, really.

This all turns out, confusingly, to be a movie within a movie, watched by a bunch of boring simpletons in this kind of weird hellscape of an apartment building. The entire movie pretty much takes place here, inside this giant Kafka-esque block of an apartment. It’s kind of a strange, claustrophobic setting that could’ve been effective if they’d known what they were doing. But it doesn’t seem like much more than an excuse not to spend money filming in actually interesting locations.

Instead, you mostly just get scenes that play like something out of a bad comedy. Like, this one girl is having a huge birthday party and locks herself in her room in the middle of it and watches the Demons movie. A demon starts coming out of the TV and, when it goes to static, she just tries to change the channel – shows how deep TV gets you. People get addicted to the shit enough to prefer it over preventing their own imminent death. The funny thing is, this movie is so bland that this isn’t even social commentary – it’s just another in the line of stupid, meaningless shit that happens.

The movie basically then becomes a lot of people turning into demons and killing people and stuff. It’s all a lot of noise – a lot of people who stand in place screaming as the demons kill them. It’s not really much of a challenge for the demons here, guys. You’re like easy pickings now. At least put up a little bit of a fight! It’s barely even a fucking horror movie if the characters just sit and wait to die. At that point it’s, what, just a dinner for the monsters? A potluck maybe?

They try and compensate for it by having the actors over-do all their scenes like they’re having epileptic seizures. That can be kind of funny at first, but after like an hour of just screaming, it’s like being in the middle of a bunch of cranky infants. Not really what I look for in a horror movie, guys!

There are various characters, but none who are really interesting. Oh man, tell me more about the gym guy who shouts at everybody to lift more weights! He’s such a compelling character I think my brain is gonna explode. William Faulkner and Alfred Hitchcock only could have DREAMED about a character this good.

Oh, the pregnant woman faces off against a small child turned into a demon – you have to be pretty weak to not be able to beat up a child. I know normally you wouldn’t want to, but this thing has mottled green skin and eyes like an inferno. Not sure the normal rules apply. It should be easy enough to defeat the kid but, by horror movie rules, the pregnant chick has a really hard time of it. Then a monster does an Alien-style chest burst out of the kid and out comes a tiny little goblin-like thing that looks like a shitty rubber McDonalds toy. Truly, what am I even fucking looking at with this?

I’ve been grasping at straws trying to talk about this, but it’s tough because there’s so much shit happening and all of it is so boring and inconsequential. There’s never a sense that anything in the story is moving forward. It’s all just random scenes, arranged arbitrarily, as if drawn from a hat and then slapped together. It’s as exciting as waiting in line at the DMV, but at least in that situation you have the ability to escape the screaming children there after less time than this movie’s runtime takes up.

I guess there’s some scenes of people in an elevator trying to hide from a demon, which are somehow more dull than if you were actually stuck in an elevator with someone in real life. And the climax is set in this underground parking lot, you know, the PRIME fucking location for ANY horror movie to be set in! My God! What a revelation, a climax so exciting that I will never enjoy any other movie again. Fuck any other cinema, this is the true zenith of all film creation!

I dunno, I really have nothing else to fucking add here. This is just a vapid, dull, awful movie and I would rather go watch the first one again.

Image copyright of its original owners, I don't own it.

Halloween (1978, 2018)

I remember being about 14 years old in 2005 and discovering horror movies. It was just this bizarre, misfit freak show treasure trove of a genre and lit my imagination on fire. I'd never been introduced to any of them before, my parents weren't huge fans. It was my own thing, brand new, and there seemed to be an infinite well of weird, eerie, macabre shit I was finding brand new. For me, it fit like a glove.

I rented them every chance I got; classics like The Exorcist and Nightmare on Elm Street as well as random shit I'd find at Blockbuster, some of it crap and occasionally maybe something cool like Frailty. It was all blending together and I was absorbing knowledge and appreciation for 'em at a rapid pace. It was an exciting time. I remember it fondly. I'd watch them several at a time, just let the day bleed away.

Director: John Carpenter

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance

IMDb

One of the biggest discoveries around that time was the original John Carpenter Halloween film. It just blew me away for the starkness and simplicity of it. Just a guy stalking a neighborhood at night with a knife. It's not anything really more than that, and it's the scariest movie I know by my count. There's just no bullshit to it, no posturing or goofy stuff like later movies imitating it. It was just dead serious and presented unpretentiously. I liked that, even if I didn't know how to articulate it when I was a kid.

New things stand out to me every time, as they would with anything good you re-watch. This year it really struck me how creepy the voyeuristic aspects of it were, all those silent scenes of him just out of sight or just the corner of him, just breathing his weird-ass breathing under the mask, watching a girl walk around her house. How fucked is that? There's something to a fear that the person being watched doesn't even register. And it's all very mundane. This shit happens every day in some form or fashion.

But it all still holds up. It's a classic formula now, the slow build-up and then the explosion of Satanic horror and violence by the end. But it's better here than some others, mostly due to the characters. It's surprisingly enjoyable to listen to Laurie and her friends bantering. Certainly not at all just a bunch of airheaded plot-filler before the killing starts.

They're real people and the conversations are enjoyable, setting up a desire not to want these kids to die. Later on, slashers would become dime-a-dozen, made for a laugh and by people without the same attention to detail or writing quality. Amazing, the difference in quality when all you do is actively care about how your movie comes out... they barely had a budget back then, but the quality and passion shone through.

Of course it ends with the infamous cliffhanger – just Michael falling off that balcony and then when they look again, he's gone. Fucking chilling. Then all those shots of the house empty and dark with his creepy breathing over-top. Again, chilling. You'd think a huge man in a mechanic outfit and a dirty white mask, probably bleeding all over the place, wouldn't have been difficult to find, but the sequels sure made it seem like everyone on Earth just had a blind spot for the dude.

Director: David Gordon Green

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer

IMDb

**MINOR SPOILERS HERE**

Flash forward 40 years and people still like the original. That's got to be a good feeling. That people enjoy your work 40 years after the fact – it's something to aspire to. And there was even a new sequel made, disregarding all the other lame ones since the first one. They even got rid of the dumb twist that Michael was actually Laurie's sister, which was a terrible plot device that removed much of the fear from the story. Overall, it's like an annoying person was wiped away from existence and replaced with a good replicate alien, like the twist in the movie The World's End.

Now we have David Gordon Green, of weird eclectic little movies like Prince Avalanche and Joe, directing, and Jamie Lee Curtis apparently remembering the original frenzy fondly enough to re-join. Weirdly, it's titled just 'Halloween,' exactly like the first one and the 2007 remake. I guess they wanted it to be like a shell game of sorts - guess which one you're gonna get!

Now Curtis's old and grizzled but still badass – hell, if anything, her improved acting chops after a decades-long career has only made the character more compelling than she was initially. The script's a lot of pulp type stuff. Michael escapes again after a bus crash transporting him to a new prison. These prison buses really fucking suck. Laurie Strode should write her congressman and get him to do something about it. Maybe that can be the next Halloween sequel – Laurie Strode versus the endless groaning bureaucracy of government insanity.

Curtis's Laurie Strode has spent the past 40 years building a fortress-like house in the woods, complete with a barbed wire fence and Home Alone-style traps. It's not really all that realistic, but then again, I guess a movie about a senior citizen wearing a Shatner mask slaying people with a knife was never going to be some kind of true-life documentary. And seriously – Michael is fucking old in this movie. Picturing him stopping between kills to change an adult diaper or take heart meds is a good way to take the edge off if you're really creeped out by the story.

There are the two journalists – or rather, podcasters, as one of them hilariously lets slip in a very 2018 way – who are hunting down a story about Michael. I'm not sure what their aim is, as they seem to know everything already. Whenever they talk to people it just seems to be reaffirming that, yes, Michael is bad and Laurie is traumatized. There's no real point to having them here except as a ham-fisted contrivance to get Michael's mask back to him after he murders them. And yes, he kills them in a gas station, which is good because anyone who is annoying is someone we should always want murdered graphically... man, slasher movies fuck us up.

There's also Laurie's family, including a daughter who's kinda stuck up and her weird husband, and a granddaughter who seems cool. I think my favorite line comes from the daughter as she's arguing with Laurie about security – she says something like “the world's a nice, happy, peaceful place and we don't need your negativity!” Really? The world's nice, happy and peaceful? Man, I wish I lived in Laurie's daughter's strange Stepford Wives alternate reality. Clearly Laurie must have fucked something up...

It starts off slow, though it picks up speed later. I wasn't interested in the two journalists. They were seemingly just there to provide exposition and little else, and it would've behooved the film to at least try to make them a little bit endearing, at least so we wouldn't be ambivalent when they died.

But Gordon Green's got a killer sense of style and the film looks cool all the time, very epic and spooky. John Carpenter's new soundtrack is wonderfully macabre, hitting like a goddamn anvil, adding loads of suspense. Michael is still fairly imposing, which I was surprised by after so long and so many inferior movies.

There's a good amount of suspense and releasing of tension, though the film can't quite match the slow-burn eerie tension of the 1978 original. But it makes up for that in sheer gleeful brutality. It's a quick-paced thrill ride once it picks up, and Michael is perhaps even more brutal than he ever was. There's one scene where he drops a bunch of human teeth he just pulled out of someone's head on the floor to taunt a victim – it's an unusual level of personality for a guy who's usually content just to lumber along like a zombie, and not a good kind of personality. My take was that he's just that pissed off from being locked up for 40 years.

The finale is careening, fiery action-packed stuff – a survival of the fittest, tooth and nail battle of horror movie filth. Some of the time, the film beautifully and hilariously inverts the original. There's one shot where Laurie, having jumped off a balcony to escape Michael, disappears the same way he did in the first one when he's looking down for her. In another scene, she attacks him with a knife from behind the way he did to her 40 years ago. It's a bit cheesy, but come on, you're telling me that isn't fun?

The ending's basically perfect for what this script was. Quick and violent. I hope they don't make another one. Just know when to fucking end something for once.

Images copyright of their original owners; I don't own them.

Species III (2004)

It's been a few years since I did a Species review. After I did the last one, way back in 2015, my entire life changed and I didn't get around to doing the third one. But fortunately I still had this lying around! So that's great and it makes up for all the other things that have happened between then and now. I thought about saying this was just how long it took for me to work up the nerve to review another Species movie. But the truth is that this was destined to happen. It has to happen.

Director: Brad Turner

Starring: Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Sunny Mabrey

IMDb

Co-written with Colin.

This one starts out with a truck ride with a dying Eve from the other movies. She has a baby before she dies, which the driver goes rogue and steals for unknown reasons, fleeing into the woods as the military pursues him. Apparently he's good at hiding, because they don't catch him.

Then, at an unspecified later time, a cocky college science lab geek is showing people around his fancy lab, talking about mumbo jumbo and science that nobody cares about. Something about a power plant? Who knows. He questions his professor, who is the same guy who ran away from that truck and I guess is now working at a college? I dunno. The professor, aggravated at the kid's science projects, tells him that “who are you to decide who lives and dies?” Which, you know, is just how professors are; constantly wanting to crush the spirits of their students, subjugating them to their will.

Then that kid, Dean, finds out his science projects have been cancelled by the college dean, who proclaims that he can “do whatever he wants” and acts about as insane and power-hungry as a third world dictator. Is every faculty member at this fucking college an egomaniac seeking validation for their shriveled soul?

Meanwhile, college professor/military truck driver, whose name is apparently Abbott, on the run is actually hiding the alien at his house, who is a little girl right now obsessed with Red Lobster. Literally, they show a Red Lobster commercial on TV and the professor dude, I guess, has to go spend his hard earned money on fucking lobster for this alien brat, as if he just has money falling out his GODDAMN EARS!

I guess Abbott is approached later by the other alien who'd been in the truck, who has now grown up to look like a bloated Comic Con attendee with a swollen head. The alien tells him he's a halfbreed and, as such, is dying. And that there are others like him out there. This prompts Abbott to want to save these aliens... for some goddamn reason. Weren't they killing people in the other movies? Oh well. Anything to distract from actual HUMAN causes he could more easily be helping, right?

Meanwhile the girl alien grows up into a gorgeous woman, physically perfect in every way of course. I guess she's like the last true full-breed alien, or some shit like that. Hmm. The only perfect specimen to this movie is white, blonde people. Where have I heard that before? Nah, probably nothing important.

If that troubling allusion isn't your cup of tea, how about the series' tried and true theme of the aliens being sex toys? I mean, the alien girl in this never grows up past her early 20s with a flawless body, even though the aliens are supposed to like, keep growing at a very fast rate. Eve, from the other movies, was always physically perfect and young, too. I'm SURE there's a reason for this that isn't sex appeal! I'm sure it's a deeply entrenched plot point.

The dean of the school shows up at Abbott's house, for some reason having access to get in, and finds the alien chick, naked of course. He abandons every other reason he came there when she seems to want to have sex with him. I guess it's not suspicious at all if some random woman answers the door at a house you're going to and tries to have sex. I'm sure that'll end up fine... actually she kills him, which is fine as he was an asinine character.

I love that Abbott's reaction is just to shrug and be like “he had it coming” to the dean's death. Oh really? Tell us more about who ELSE deserves to die, crazy professor man. How did you even get this job anyway? Weren't you on the run from the US government? I guess the college just doesn't have very high standards.

I guess somewhere else in the movie's rolls of corpulent fat, we get one of the other half-breed aliens trying to fuck everyone to stay alive. So we get scenes of this physically perfect brunette woman wearing very scant clothes going around to have sex with dirty losers at biker bars and such. This is totally a legit plot point. It's not at all a thinly veiled way for the writer to get out his own fantasies about what women should do to regular average Joes. NO. THIS IS A REAL PLOT THREAD DONE FOR STORY AND NOT SHAMELESS NUDITY. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK OTHERWISE???

Like I'd love to get a window into some of these actress's stories. I bet she held a dream deep inside her heart for years to be an actor. Ever since she was a child, she'd wanted to be one. In school she was in all the productions, every play, working her way up to a starring role. A Midsummer Night's Dream, in middle school. Then in high school she was in A Streetcar Named Desire, playing the Stella role, and all her friends and family came out and it was the greatest night of her life. I bet she wanted to be an actor because it gave her the opportunity to explore the richness of life and the complex minds of other people and various characters. I bet she wanted to become famous and one day inspire OTHER little girls like she once had been, showing them that with hard work and determination, THEY TOO can do anything they want...

Anyway, then she landed her first “big role” and it was for this, and the director told her to take her clothes off and pretend to fuck some hairy guy in a gas station bathroom. Such is life I guess. Fucking tragic.

Oh, and somewhere in all this, Abbott dies – what a tragedy that this ridiculous character is gone. Eh, fuck it, sarcasm's a bit passe anyway.

The roommate of the main dude gets involved, because apparently he REALLY wanted to be a character too even this late in the film. He gets suckered in by this other alien chick, who ends up kidnapping him and making him do some science mumbo jumbo for her, I guess trying to further the species with more science – honestly, the science here matters almost none at all and it's pointless to explain it.

Fortunately, though, the heroes get there – well, it's just the main kid Dean and this random-ass detective who's done nothing all movie. The final battle scene is somewhere between a Star Wars and Terminator ripoff with the scenery. I guess it's OK since nobody associated with those franchises knew Species existed at this point...

Man these Species movies are just exhausting and hilarious. It's horrible filmmaking but it's also funny to watch and even funnier to make fun OF. They fill me with such complex emotions. And for as bad as they are, you have to give these movies credit for finding a way to basically make pornography marketable as a legitimate horror movie not found in some special interest section. They hid it in plain sight! It's genius!

Image copyright of its original owners if they even give a shit.

The Purge: Election Year (2016) + BONUS! (SPOILERS)

Well, it's the time of year to be patriotic again, so of course there's another Purge movie to shit all over that and ruin it for everybody. This is Election Year!

And yes, there's SPOILERS for the movie in this review and the podcast. Beware! Or just read the spoilers and don't go see the fucking movie. I dunno. Do what you want. I'm still typing in bold and it makes this part of the review look important.

Director: James DeMonaco

Starring: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Here's a podcast Michelle and I did about it:

The both of us really, really fucking hated The Purge: Anarchy back in 2014. It was just so awful, from the over the top political message to the implication that all Americans really are just awful, shitty people. I feel secure in reinforcing that it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. You know, so far as anyone claiming something is the worst ever on the internet can be taken seriously. Which isn't much – hyperbole is like 99-cent candy bars here. It's cheap currency and you can buy it at shitty, seedy gas stations from teenagers high on pot.

So, Election Year. I'll start off by showing this scene of the Lincoln Memorial covered in blood, gore and burning trash. I wonder who's going to clean that up? This is the most odious crime committed on Purge Night. I have no sympathy for litterbugs!

Throughout the movie they constantly say it's their American right to Purge and blather on about freedom, but then this happens and no one cares. Bull fucking shit. Americans are so zealously patriotic and symbol-obsessed that they'd murder someone who did this on a day that wasn't The Purge night.

We see the New Founding Fathers, apparently the totalitarian leaders of America in the future, plotting against this senator lady, Charlie Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, who is running for president. She has the audacity to want to end the Purge because her family died in it 20 years ago. What an irrational bitch, am I right?

Stop your emotional liberal appeals in the face of our liberties! Wait, this is getting a bit too real.

These guys cackle like Halloween Jack O'Lanterns and speak in all the overemphasized cadence and exaggerated verbosity of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Oh, wait, there are no Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Which means there is no God.

Anyway, the scenes of Senator Roan debating the other dude who wants to keep the Purge – who is some sort of ultraconservative preacher character who acts like a lost Bugs Bunny villain – are just the bottom of the barrel. The rest of the movie, then, is below the bottom of the barrel. It's underneath the fucking barrel.

The fact that it's such a controversy to stop making murder legal once a year, to the point where one candidate is laughing at another for suggesting it, is batshit crazy. I'm sure you could spin this into a decent satire of some sort, but the movie lacks the self awareness and the good writing to make it seem realistic.

There are also multiple scenes of this corner store in a middle class/poor area of town. There's the owner, Joe Dixon, and a host of side characters like this Hispanic immigrant guy who works with him and a woman who is a regular customer and who drives a van on Purge night to help people. I just think all of these scenes are such a load of horse shit. They're all so fake-folksy, like a corporation trying to relate to the 'common people' by pretending to be idyllic and cute and all of that. It's like Coca Cola putting a rap song into a commercial - you're not fooling anyone.

Oh, but there is a scene of two crazy, psychotic middle school girls who try to steal one candy bar from the store. This becomes a central plot point for the first half of the movie. No, I'm not even kidding.

The big change to Purge night this year is that anyone can be targeted, even government officials, who previously you couldn't target. That should've been a whiff of bullshit so strong that even the dumbest “patriotic” rednecks would have cried foul and ended the whole thing years ago. But remember, in the universe of the Purge, Americans are all universally self-centered idiots who take Fox News as the gospel and swallow their bullshit like donuts at Free Donut Day. Definitely isn't the writers themselves projecting their own idiocy! Nope! It's all Americans that are like this!

So, yeah, we get reintroduced to the guy from the last movie, Barnes, played by Frank Grillo. He has as much character as the lamp I bought last week. He has no charisma on screen and adds so little to this movie or the last one that you could replace him in every scene with a Photoshopped picture of a duck playing the saxophone, and the movie would at least have something kind of endearing in it. This time, he's the Secret Service or something for Charlie Roan. How did he go from revolutionary lone wolf to a Secret Service member? This is making all those times real Secret Service got caught fucking Colombian hookers and letting crazy people onto the White House lawn look like premiere hiring, real career guys.

We see more of his expert prowess when they set up this whole security detail at Charlie Roan's house, protecting her from the Purge night. It doesn't last more than 20 minutes before it's revealed that almost every security guy they hired is corrupt and actually working for the New Founding Fathers to kill Charlie! Wow, maybe you should've spent more than twenty minutes vetting these security guys and not been multi-tasking on your phone playing Online Billiards or whatever the fuck.

So then they go and hide out conveniently in the folksy corner store from before – wow, you mean there was a reason they showed those two separate storylines earlier on? What expert level, Shakespearean storytelling! This leads to some truly masterful dialogue between Barnes and Joe Dixon, in which Dixon constantly assumes Barnes is being racist to him. Only the dialogue here isn't good enough to actually convey any tension, and so their constant bickering actually just makes the movie itself look subtly racist. Just because one of them's a black dude and the other isn't doesn't mean every conversation they have has to sound like Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson in Die Hard 3 – you fucking hacks. It isn't the early 1990s anymore, for one thing, and for another, your movie isn't as smart as Die Hard 3. Certainly not enough to pull this off.

Not to mention pretty much all the black characters come from some rough past in 'the streets.' And the one Hispanic guy is from a horrible war-torn part of Mexico that he compares the Purge to. You know, just because you graduated beyond writing black characters like Song of the South or something, doesn't mean you're not racist anyway.

Oh, and the foreigner characters who have vaguely non-denominational European accents (they're just "foreigners") are only in the movie because they've come from overseas to participate in Purge night. They're portrayed as bloodthirsty, remorseless serial killers. EVERYONE FROM ANOTHER CULTURE IS EVIL! HIDE IN YOUR HOMES! VOTE TRUMP!

"This'll sure look cool at the Halloween Horror Nights attraction!"

But fortunately you don't have long to think about that, as the psychotic high school girls arrive in a car covered with Christmas lights, dressed like dominatrixes and acting like literal wild animals would if they had a basic command of English. And yes, the main one is still after the one candy bar – that's her whole motivation. She's going to kill people just to get a fucking candy bar.

This is one of those scenes like from the last movie where I just can't suspend my disbelief. What did these girls do the other 364 days a year that weren't Purge night? How did they function normally in society? The movie implies that there doesn't need to be an answer, because humans are just shittier in the future for unspecified, vague reasons including the words 'moral decline.' Fuck that and fuck you, movie.

The girls do get run over though! So there is that, for some mildly okay gore. If that's all you need, then The Purge: Election Year has your dismal standards covered!

A lot of other shit happens after that. I don't care to get into all of it. It's mostly badly shot, poorly paced, boring action movie crap and it's not even exciting to look at, with everything being so dark and grimy all the time.

Walking around at night with shitty haunted house traps set up in the city and predictably coming out unscathed = drama and suspense, I guess.

The climax involves a plot by this rebel group to blow up a church where this group of rich 1%ers is having this sermon praising the Purge for letting them get their 'demons' out, or some bullshit. The rival Senator is leading the whole thing. Only then they kidnap Charlie Roan and tie her up and intend to murder her for their big sermon thing.

That means one candidate for president is kidnapping and attempting to murder the other. It's like if Donald Trump went to Hillary Clinton's house, held her at gunpoint and killed her, and then expected everyone else to just act like nothing happened the next day and continue the election without her later. It's utter lunacy. The fact that someone wrote this and another person greenlighted it as if to say “yes, this is a smart plotline” makes me convinced we're doomed and Trump is going to win.

Fortunately, through a series of contrivances, the villains move much too slowly to actually kill her, so the good guys can save her. So glad they spend a ton of time monologuing, and then when they go to slit her throat, they do it as poorly as possible. Then they have a big shoot out fight, punctuated with Joe Dixon inserting incredibly lame and unfunny “jokes” throughout every time there's a pause. They're seriously not funny at all. I've heard things said at funerals that were funnier.

He dies at the end anyway, taking a bullet for Charlie Roan in another slow, poorly drawn-out scene that she should've died from but the script wouldn't allow it. Because really, what good is a black character in a horror movie if he doesn't die tragically? Otherwise you might actually have to do crazy things like make them "likable" or give them "personalities."

Then it turns out Charlie Roan actually wins the fucking election that year. It would have been hilarious if she lost. Wouldn't that have been a dark twist? Too bad, sometimes the progressive light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel candidate just can't win? Would've been salt in the wounds for Bernie supporters watching this anyway.

But yeah, she wins and ends the Purge, I guess. I don't understand how. If people wanted the Purge night to change this badly, why did it go on for so long? 20 fucking years of that before people finally decided to change it? Really? The only implication I can see is that there was no candidate advocating for the end of the Purge that whole time. The whole fucking 20 years of legal murder, and not one candidate until this Charlie Roan lady even breached the subject. Wow. That's a lot of bullshit to swallow!

This movie is awful just like the last one. The whole political message just makes no sense – it's a skewering of the American right wing through the lens of this far left view, but the way all the poor and homeless and minorities are depicted – as degenerates or very broadly drawn, unflattering stereotypes – swings it right back to more of a right wing view, like the caricatures of Fox News-style fearmongering. It's a confusing, poorly thought out message.

Mostly, the movie implies that Americans are just a bunch of stupid, assholeish simpletons who would allow their country to get this far gone. The proof I have of this is that at no point during these Purge movies do you see people trying to really help those under attack. Only the worst of society is ever shown. The whole point is that medical services and ambulances and police don't have to do their jobs. So you're telling me that out of all those doctors and cops and well-meaning citizens who actually have souls, none of them are willing to go help out anyway? All of them are really that selfish and shitty? It's really just every man for himself? That's perhaps the biggest load of bullshit in the movie, and that's not a small feat.

People are better than this movie or the other piece of trash that precluded it think. People would help out where they could, form tons of organized coalitions to save people on Purge night, and they really would not let this stuff go on for like 20 years before saying hey, we need to stop this.

I know this is just a bullshit fictional universe, but come on – you need to have a plausible, believable fantasy. This movie doesn't. And it would be more interesting with more characters fighting back against the Purge, helping people and generally not rolling over and playing dead and letting us only see the worst people in the world on screen. But I guess the movie really needed to push that 'Americans are shitty people' message!

Even aside from that, it's a boring, shitty action movie with no good characters or scenes. There's no suspense and every part of the plot is poorly written cliché. There's nothing to like about this. It's all hack work trash, and I don't have any qualms with saying so. Fuck The Purge: Election Year.

BONUS: WHY THE PURGE IS A STUPID FUCKING IDEA IN GENERAL

As a bonus, Michelle and I were talking the other night about this movie some more, and really, the whole idea of the Purge in general gets more insane the more you think about it - i.e. even thinking a tiny, little bit at all crumbles the entire concept. Let's go over some of the implications of this world:

• Can prisoners rise up and kill the guards and break out of jail on Purge night? That seems like something that should be addressed. There's certainly enough prisoners to do so, like at least 400 against, what, 80 guards at most? Seems like that would be a mess to clean up the next day.

• What about crimes that have nothing to do with murder? Remember, all crime is legal. What if a stockbroker steals a bunch of money from his trading company and throws the world economy off balance?

• I guess rape is legal now on Purge night, so any number of horrible things could happen. If the point of Purge night is reducing crime – well, I'm pretty sure the victims of rape wouldn't be thanking you, jackasses.

• I wonder what it's like for people to have to live with ramifications of the Purge after it happens. Like if a boss kills a competitor – is that looked upon as a legitimate transaction later? Like 'oh, I guess it's okay cause of Purge night'? “Gee, it really sucks that Mike killed our boss last night. He was about to give me that raise and help me feed my starving children.”

• What about when one of your co-workers brutally murders another co-worker? How does the rest of the office look that first co-worker in the eye the rest of the year? Someone's not getting invited to the office party. I'm picturing it like that scene from Office Space where they all pass over Milton and don't let him have any cake. That seems like what would happen.

• Are American territories included in the Purge? Do people on the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico get to participate? What if some rogue state official wanted to bomb another country and had the keys to the nuclear weapons? Would the whole world have to just shrug their shoulders and forget about it because oh, those goofy Americans and their all-crime-is-legal holiday?!

Holy fuck. They really didn't think any of this through. This is what happens when you don't do enough world-building for your fictional world. The Purge just gets worse and worse the more you actually look at the logic behind it. This has to be among the worst bullshit in modern cinema!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them and are making no money off this.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

By this point, you've read enough about, and hidden from enough spoilers about, the new Star Wars movie, that I barely need to make an introduction. For a bit of background shading on my own history of Star Wars - because, really, this is one of those cultural touchstones that everyone's personal experience colors a bit - I grew up around the time the prequels were coming out, and by extension, I fondly remember watching old VHS rental and borrowed copies of the originals on my parents' living room TV and just letting the day bleed away as I marathoned the whole trilogy. That was a part of my childhood, which I lovingly returned the favor to by never watching them again for about 15 years. Which, eh, sounds kind of cold when I put it that way.

But I did see the original trilogy again recently, and I liked it. They're simple, fun, fast, unpretentious adventure films. I didn't really expect much out of The Force Awakens except a safe nostalgia cash-in, but I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised. I actually really enjoyed this movie.

Not to say that was a great feat of storytelling from director J.J. Abrams. He obviously intended to recreate the exact feel, style, temperament and storytelling devices that the original Star Wars used. This was a labor of love for him, though like I've been saying for months: Abrams couldn't mess this up. We were bound to get something like this, something so imitative and throwback-y, because if Abrams messed with the formula too much, he would be the most hated man in the world.

What surprised me was how well done it was for all of that. This was a seriously enjoyable, fun ride that didn't feel at all like 2.5 hours had gone by when I finally walked out of the theater at the end credits. Far from just using the surface aesthetics and some similar locations and plot devices, Abrams kept to the tenets of what George Lucas and company did back in 1977 on a deeper level. He made a fast, fun adventure, sometimes light on explanation and which worked on its simple emotional pull and explosive action scenes. That could be done at any time, but the feel is genuinely the same, which I don't think was as easy. It's got the same rugged, sort of dirty feel to a lot of it, and the same sense of wonder, yearning and adventure. It would have been easy to throw together a plastic commercial vehicle, but you can tell Abrams loved Star Wars and wanted to make something good.

For the first time in decades, you like these new Star Wars characters. Daisy Ridley as desert scavenger chick Rey is feisty and charming, and John Boyega will win your heart instantly as the bumbling, sometimes cowardly, but ultimately good hearted Finn. Both of these characters have distinct personalities and you want to see them evolve and change, like the characters from the originals. Perhaps the old Star Wars films felt a bit dirtier and grittier, a bit less cutesy with the characters' dialogue, but it's a minor nitpick and I found myself really enjoying these characters anyway.

The way you're drawn into the characters through simple, quick exposition in the middle of great action scenes is so basic, but it works. The fact that this seems so fresh to me now says a lot for the quality of other recent action films. And as an added bonus, we finally have new, cool characters and we don't know what will happen to them later. That's sad that I'm that excited about that. But fucking seriously. With all the Marvel movies being based on existing comic book stories, and films like the Hunger Games trilogy being set in stone from the novels, it's refreshing to have a new set of characters to follow. This is especially better than any prequel about an existing pop culture character. Can you get any shittier and less interesting than that? I don't think so.

The fact that Rey and Finn spend so much time in hushed awe of Luke Skywalker, speaking of him like he's a myth, and Han Solo, is telling - this is the first Star Wars film in so many years, and by having dialogue like that, the movie is letting us know that they have the spirit of the originals in mind and are taking them seriously - reverently, even. The fact that the movie does feel like the old ones affirms that.

Kylo Ren's tantrums and slavish worship of his grandfather Darth Vader, as well, could be seen as a look at the dangers of idolatry. He's a total entitled little douche, and he desperately wants to be as cool as Darth Vader, to claim some throne ages old that he never got to see. Sorta like fans get angry at Star Wars and other science fiction worlds, as some sort of futile way to attempt a power grab in their own lives. It's all rather symbolic. All of this stuff is obviously looking too far into things, but it's fun to think about anyway.

It was so good to see Han Solo and Chewbacca again, too. And Leia. And C-3PO. Carrie Fisher isn't given many good lines or room to stretch her acting chops, but watching Harrison Ford play Han again is like magic, and Chewbacca is also extremely enjoyable to watch.

Plot-wise, it's pretty similar to the 1977 original - an evil empire is searching for a droid, which falls into the hand of an unsuspecting chosen one on a desert planet. The settings are obviously retro homages to the ones from the original, right down to the Tatooine-like desert planet and the mechanical hell of a new Death Star. If that bothers you, well, I guess it bothers you.  People will raise problems and nitpick this, for sure. The plot is pretty convenient in a lot of places just to move it along, the story isn't particularly fresh or deep, and there are some points where it glazes over things or blatantly panders to the audience who loved the original.

But honestly, none of that mattered to me when I was watching this. For one, pandering to fans who loved the original is basically what we wanted. Let's not kid ourselves. If this had been anything like the prequels, or changed in some shitty way, we would have hated it. And all the conveniences and parts where things are explained too fast or not well enough - all that stuff was basically how the originals handled it, so it's not like I can come down on this one too hard for it. The originals were never exactly masters of elucidation.

(I know some people wanted the Extended Universe, but ssshhhhhhh.)

And really, the point of the movie was to get you caught up in the sweeping adventure and thrill of it all. That's what a movie like this is supposed to do. It was masterfully crafted in that way. I was entertained, and I didn't think about any of the movie's flaws or minor problems until after I had left the theater. That's the difference between a good movie and a bad one - suspension of disbelief. In a bad movie, you're taken out of the story by the plotholes. In a good movie, you don't notice any flaws until afterwards when you're actually thinking about it and dissecting it.

Originality is overrated. People who want every idea to be new and different are crazy. There's something to be said when there IS a great, fresh new idea for a story that nobody else has told before. But we've been making movies for 100 years, and telling stories to each other long before that. If your whole opinion of a movie is based on how original it is, you're not going to be easily satisfied and I think it's just needless nitpicking. I think there is room for a good story even if it's been done before. Execution matters. Spirit and attitude matter. Good, well written characters matter. The message matters. There's so much more to a movie than whether or not it's been "done before."

The Force Awakens works because it's a heartfelt, exciting action movie. The characters are wonderful and the world is expansive and engaging. I loved it and I want to see more films in this world again, which is as ringing an endorsement as there's likely to be.

Now, time for some spoilers!

SPOILERS

• So Han Solo died, I guess. It was a good scene. His showdown with Kylo Ren is pretty chilling even though you know it won't end well - or, because of that, rather. There's so much being communicated in their eyes as they stare each other down, so much rage and love unsaid - it's a quite masterful display of acting, especially for a sci fi action movie like this. I hope future films have Ren expounding on this plot, maybe feeling a bit bad, or even just going even darker and telling us why he hated Han so much.
• At the same time though, Harrison Ford has wanted them to kill Han Solo off ever since Empire Strikes Back in the early 80s. I'm glad he finally got his wish. I can picture how that conversation went with the producers. "PLEASE, KILL ME!" he pleaded. And they just sighed, threw up their hands, and said okay, we'll do it.
• That whole Death Star/Starkiller or whatever it was called at the climax was kind of lame. How many times are they going to try to make a Death Star? At some point, it gets redundant and even crazy. "I'm sure it'll work THIS time, even though it has never worked before!"
• The plotline about this map that leads to Luke at the first Jedi temple better be explained more later. It's kind of weird to have a map leading there that apparently no one can understand just because one piece is missing. Are they all just new to this part of the galaxy?
• At the end, there is a moment when R2D2 finally wakes up and C3PO slaps him on the head. I wanted him to just go back to sleep. That woulda been funny.
• Not much explanation for who the First Order is, or what they're trying to do aside from Kylo Ren and this Snoke character wanting that lightsaber. There should have probably been a bit more explanation of those things, even just a few lines.
• The plot arc as a whole would have been better if it was more about Finn and Han and Chewie saving Rey from the First Order. They tried to shove in a lot of crap at the end about this giant Death Star thing blowing up a planet full of people we never see. It feels like they tried to do a bit much. A smaller scope would have served the movie better.
• How cool is Finn's character arc? A Stormtrooper who grows a conscience and deflects from the First Order? Bad fucking ass. Rey, too, is immensely captivating. She's such a strong, cool character that you forget she's basically a very young woman who still has these hang-ups and wants to get home and wait for whoever abandoned her on that shithole desert planet. That's a simple arc but a powerful one.
• It was bizarre how Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) survived. That ship crash landed on that planet and sank into the sand. Then later, you just see him flying around in another X-wing. It's like what happened is too horrible to describe and he never wants to speak of it again. It's OK man. We're here for you.
• I can't believe "TRAITOR!!!" has become a meme. That wasn't what I expected.
• The final shot was very good. Brief, but it would have ruined the whole thing if they changed even a second of it.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Most people know the Halloween series for one thing: Michael Myers, that lovable lunk-head who likes to go around and kill his family members on Halloween every year. I guess he’s a bit one dimensional, but hey, he had spirit to him. But if there’s an outlier to the series, most people would point to the 1982 sequel, Season of the Witch.

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Starring: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was the only one not to feature Myers as the killer, as the studio wanted to turn this series into an anthology with different stories every year. But the movie bombed and people were unhappy with the lack of Myers, so they ended up scrapping that idea completely, like a bunch of pussies, and brought back Myers for a bunch of sequels almost no one liked.

But this isn’t TOO bad, is it? I mean, it’s got a pretty cool soundtrack. And it has plenty of children running around, happy that Halloween is right around the corner. Ahh, yes. I can feel the autumnal ambiance already…except in the opening scene, where we see a man being chased by a bunch of guys in suits, who are apparently trying to kill him for some reason. That’s not very nice of them.

The movie is about this doctor, Daniel Challis, who is doing normal doctor things like disappointing his family on Halloween by having to go back into work for an emergency, and grabbing nurses’ asses like a fucking creep. He’s the best guy ever. But the reason he was called in is to tend to the guy from the opening chase scene. He’s been brought in almost dead and clutching a pumpkin mask, and he uses his last dying breath to tell a doctor they’re all going to die. Makes sense to me. I’m gonna use my last words on Earth to say things that sound ominous like for a horror movie trailer, too!

"Nothing can save you now...was that good enough for a trailer quote?"
"Eh, sure."

Challis is also constantly surrounded by, well, the catchiest song in the universe.



Yes, this commercial jingle in the movie’s world is for Silver Shamrock, a company which makes a bunch of masks for kids - well, really only a bunch of copies of the same three masks for kids. Because, apparently, what little kids really want is to be mindless conformist drones all wearing the exact same fucking costumes. The song is played probably two or three dozen times in this movie. I’m tempted to say it’s actually the starring role here.

The plot is, I guess, that the guy who died was delivering something for that mask company and caught wind of what they were really doing, which is why they sent those Terminator-esque guys to silence him. One of them sneaks back in later and finishes the job:

But before he can be prosecuted, he does the typical criminal thing and lights himself on fire in his own car. God dammit. Another one slips through the cracks of the American justice system...

I can't tell you how many times this very specific incidence has prevented the justice system from being able to prosecute a killer. Damn, just damn.

The dead guy’s daughter, Ellie, played by Stacey Nelkin, shows up and is obviously distraught. This character shows a lot of realistic grief and gives the movie a somber tone. Nah, just kidding; she teams up with Challis instantly to go on a ludicrous adventure to solve her father’s murder. That’s a pretty unusual way to grieve. “Hey, random doctor who works at the hospital where my father died! Let’s go solve the murder!”

It's especially baffling when you remember that Challis is a doctor, and most doctors are not usually qualified to solve murders. A lot of the time, cops handle that instead. I guess the cops in this movie's world were just too busy doing other things, like playing pub trivia or looking for the next best deal on used furniture. So solving crimes just fell to the next rank down the pecking order, doctors, to take care of solving the murders.

Their investigation leads them to this small town where Silver Shamrock masks are made in a giant cliche looking evil factory. In the hotel at night, Challis initially offers to sleep on the floor or in his car, which is nice of him, being a gentleman. Then Ellie asks him where he wants to sleep, eyes wide like a deer in headlights (though I believe it’s supposed to be a flirtatious look), and Challis doesn’t miss a beat. He immediately goes “Where do you THINK I want to sleep?”

Clearly, he was just waiting for this. He is a big fan of ‘my father just died and we’re trying to solve his murder’ sex, you know - the popular fetish.

It's an aphrodisiac.

Most of the movie after this point is just the characters wandering around trying to spy on Silver Shamrock, which turns the movie into a bigger budget version of you and your friends playing James Bond as kids in the backyard. Seriously, how many scenes are there in this movie of Challis just running from place to place? What is the director’s fetish with that?

But I guess I can see why Silver Shamrock is scary. I mean, their malfunctioning equipment is still deadly enough to kill people with laser beams to the face!

Then a bug comes out of her face, but I'm pretty sure the bug was always in there, and the laser just let it out.

It turns out the mastermind behind all this is a man named Conal Cochran, who gets the prize for being the most affable mass murder aspirer ever. Seriously, he may be trying to kill children with evil masks, but listening to his deep, comforting voice, you almost want to believe that the batshit nonsense he is spewing makes sense.

He could convince you to eat your own pinkie toe, he's so charismatic.

They find out that for some reason, they can’t contact anyone outside the town! That’s no good. It’s implied heavily that Cochran is behind this because, who the fuck else would it be in this movie? So they go ahead and break into the Silver Shamrock factory. They almost immediately get into a fight with the army of robots inside. Yes, really. An army of robots. I know it sounds like I’m just doing mad libs at this point, but it’s true.

And then the army of (blank) kidnapped the hero, who works as a (blank) so he wouldn't stop the evil (blank) from doing (blank) to all the children of the world.

They catch both Challis and Ellie and tie them up. Meanwhile, all the kids in the country are buying the same three stupid masks from this company for Halloween, which Cochran reveals will kill them if they see the commercial while wearing them. Okay, for one, that’s pretty cool technology, which I am sure Apple or Google is already developing. And two, really? All the kids buy those masks? There was no one buying a Batman costume or a cowboy one? Everyone just wanted those three same masks? I gotta say - the movie is making an excellent critique of ‘be like everybody else’ mass marketing culture.

...or, maybe, it’s just dumb. Yeah. Maybe that.

"Alright, we got three masks! Hooray for variety!"

We also see what happens when the mask activates: it collapses your head and makes bugs come out. That’s pretty cool.

Eh, it was before the current safety standards were enacted. What can you do?

There’s also a scene where Cochran explains his plan to Challis - he’s going to kill all the children in the world with masks because he doesn’t like how commercialized Halloween has become, wanting to return it to its original Pagan roots. Well, hey, seems a bit extreme, but we all need a hobby.

They escape, killing the robots and for some reason leaving Cochran alive - seriously, it didn't show him dying. He could still be out there now!

Then later in the car, it’s revealed that Ellie herself is a robot now, and she tries to kill Challis in the car. I actually think it’s because she had a delayed reaction to him sleeping with her while they were trying to solve her father’s murder. She just realized, hey, this guy is a dickbag. But it’s okay, he kills her and leaves her on the side of the road. Wow. Once a douchebag, always a douchebag.

This screenshot sums up the whole movie for me, actually.

Then he tries to stop everyone from showing the commercial, making several frantic calls to TV stations. A couple of them, surprisingly, actually do it - I guess they always listen to insane doctors screaming on the phone and change their scheduled programming for them. But most do not, as the commercial is apparently on every single station. The movie ends with mask-wearing kids watching the commercial and Challis screaming as Armageddon comes. So overall, a happy ending.

"If you could see how wide I'm opening my mouth right now, you would definitely give me what I want!"

Halloween III is a silly movie. It's got a slow, trudging pace and a lot of silly moments. When you think about the plot, it makes no sense. Why were there robots working for Conal Cochran? How did they make those masks? The rest of the story, like the whole 'doctor and beautiful girl team up to solve murder and have sex' plot, is pretty hilariously dated. The movie is slow-paced almost to a fault.

...but, somehow, it still works!

Yeah. It's just got that corny, fun vibe about it. The soundtrack is great and the plot is ghoulishly fun. It could be a lot better, and some just won't be able to look beyond the flaws. But I thought it was a nice slice of October fun with a goofy plot like they just don't make anymore. If you want a fun horror flick to watch this Halloween, this wouldn't be a bad choice. And at least it's better than 90% of the actual Michael Myers Halloween movies...

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

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

The first Woman in Black movie with Daniel Radcliffe was an excellent real estate ad for those looking to buy old English country homes. The movie itself was a contest by the filmmakers to see how long they could stay awake during endless scenes of Radcliffe walking around in the dark with nothing happening. I guess that description sounded good to somebody, because now we have the sequel, Angel of Death.

Director: Tom Harper

Starring: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one is set in World War II, and sure, there was a war going on, kids were in the trenches fighting for their lives and there were unspeakable horrors going on at the concentration camps, but hey, we NEED to focus on this silly haunted house ghost story right now! That's amazing to me. You could do anything – it's a fucking period piece – but instead, we just get the same stuff we're used to from movies set in the plain old modern day. "But they set THIS one in the 40s!" Well, okay. It must be better then.

I mean, surely there were no better story ideas? How about a bunch of soldiers come across a house and stay there for shelter during a storm? Maybe a wounded or discharged officer trying to cope with the war AND the ghost? Nah. We really need another bullied loner kid story and a cliché romantic subplot! That's really original, guys!

On the plus side, it does work as a sleep aid – Michelle actually told me it worked for her that way after the movie ended.

The movie begins with a bombing in London during World War II. Gee, I have never actually seen a movie start off with such an accurate description of how it did at the box office.

Then we get our main character, a woman named Eve Parkins taking a bunch of kids to this house on an island to keep them safe. She is introduced to Edward, whose parents died in the bombings, and who now wears the permanent expression of sorrow more fitting for a kid who's just realized his acting career won't be helped by starring in this.

His loss of his parents could be a positive thing, if he spins it and becomes English WWII Batman. That would actually be awesome. Much more awesome than this movie.

They go to this old house, which gives us more of the movie's favorite thing ever – showing us the house as if we have the option to come to the open house next Tuesday. It's not a very good real estate agent though, as rather than warm and inviting, we just get a broken down house with everything ruined. Thanks for nothing, guys!

"Ugh, the LIGHTS aren't even on?! Worst open house ever."

It turns out the movie did find one use for the World War II setting – pseudo-intellectual dialogue that doesn't really reveal anything insightful about the characters or story or even, really, the times. But what would we do without characters talking about how strong they need to be to survive, which is something that could be from literally any time and any situation? Aren't there better ways to develop characters? Nah. Just throw bullshit hollow platitudes in and call it a day. Back to our bland supernatural lobotomy-fuel horror!

Most of the first hour is just boring as fuck. It's all played out scenes of Edward, who is silent, withdrawn and likes drawing pictures, being bullied by the other kids. Sure, like one girl is sort of nice to him, but even she's just doing the bare minimum any character does in these sorts of movies – every once in a while she'll call out for them to stop being so mean. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

"Teacher, can't we get one decent line or some kind of identifiable character trait?"
"NO!!! As punishment for asking that, you must write I have been a bad child 100 times on the blackboard!"

I mean, I guess we could have had actually well written dialogue for the kids that made you like them, and actually treated them like human beings. Whoa there, bucko, don't get TOO progressive on us there!

There's nothing overly annoying about most of this stuff, but they just do so little with their story. It's like having the ingredients to make a really great five-star cuisine, but then just settling for McDonalds for dinner instead, out of laziness and convenience.

But hey, at least we have a bunch of jump scares! Shitty ones! Ones where you see a glimpse of some Grudge-style white-faced ghost and then the character turns around and sees nothing! Give me a hip, hip, hooray for that!

….Guys? GUYS?!

Oh well. The film trudges on as we see Eve has a tragic past that can easily be explained in a short flashback complete with cliché orangey colors and slow music. Apparently she had a baby and since she wasn't married, the hospital took it away from her – that's really all we get.

This is almost a scary scene. You're closer to hot than to cold. But this is the closest you'll get, I'm afraid. Sad...

It's a story, I'll give them that – but that doesn't mean they did much with it. They didn't really do anything. It's the equivalent of a guy winning the lottery and spending the money incrementally on the same stuff he bought at CVS every day before he won. Complete waste of time.

But at least we have another backstory scene as Mr. Pilot Man, whose name I suppose is actually Harry, stops the car with Eve just to tell her his sob story about how he was a coward in the war and left his buddies to die. This character constantly has a deer-in-headlights look, like he has been locked in a room his whole life waiting for a Pantene commercial that he's been specially bred to star in. So I can believe he's a World War II pilot if I stretch my disbelief far enough!

They find one of the bully kids dead in the thorns outside in the morning, which I guess is really the point when they start to ask questions.

...Or it would be in a movie that had any logical sense. But in this movie, it's just another thing that happens – nobody really questions it or has a big reaction. I guess you could argue they figured that kid just wandered outside and died accidentally – but even then, nobody really seems to care. That child's death is just glossed over like nothing. I realize these kids have all the personality of a pack of playing cards left out in the rain, but that's not THEIR fault – that's the writers' fault at Satan's Movie Studio.

The movie rolls slothfully along, with some more random jump scares and some scenes with scary toys that should have probably been removed by now. But we needed some dismally small attempt to scare the audience, so it's pandering time on a level usually reserved for four year olds watching Barney the Dinosaur. If you think this is scary, you probably shouldn't go Trick or Treating this year; you'll probably have a heart attack.

It's scary because that stuff was found in an abandoned toy factory and ominous lighting was put on it. OoooOOoooohhh...

Eve, meanwhile, gets locked underground with a zombie version of this one doctor character from earlier. He blabbers on about some prophetic sounding nonsense, and once she gets out, she realizes she has to take the kids away from the house, putting together the clues from the nonsense that ghost was mumbling about. Because she is the type of teacher who lets supernatural ghosts and ghouls guide her decisions. Today, they would probably call her crazy and fire her for this, but in the 1940s, she was just being a good teacher.

"You look like a credible person that I should listen to!"

So they recruit Mr. Pilot Coward Man Harry to take them off the island, which he does – he takes them to the greatest place possible, a decoy airfield used to make the enemy bomb them during the war. That sounds like an amazing place to hide a bunch of scared children, doesn't it? Take them on a field trip there, pop open a bottle of wine. Why not?

I also love the contrived romantic scene we get here - Harry reveals that he had been making up a lot of his stories about being a pilot, and that he never made it out of training. Eve's response to this is to kiss him right there. Which just goes to show you - cowardice and lying gets you chicks.

Harry shows off his true nature when the place gets bombed like, a few hours after they arrive (great place to take kids, remember?!), and Edward tries to run back to the island. Harry tries to save him, but pusses out at the last second and instead goes back to the bunker like the weak-ass bitch he is. It would be one thing if we saw the conflict of his character doing this. But this is his face when he's telling Eve about how Edward was lost:

Amazing. The heartbreak is achingly obvious. I feel for this man in a way I've never felt for a movie character.

Truly heart-rending.

Anyway, Eve decides Edward is still alive, and so she goes back to the island and the old house. This results in an extra endurance round of 'boring scenes of searching the house while sad music plays,' where nothing is accomplished except for padding this movie out some more. It's only an hour and forty minutes, but goddamn, does it drag like a deflated wet balloon across a hot blacktop.

The movie also seems to think that rocking chairs are scary. A lot of these kinds of movies do this - see also Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring - they all do this scare. Why? Did a rocking chair traumatize the writers when they were young?

While looking out a window, she sees Edward walking on the frozen marsh toward this giant cross thing sticking out. She somehow makes it out of there super fast, and runs to him, but they both sink into the water. Fortunately, Harry the Pilot Man comes to save them, jumping into the water and helping to pull them out of a pile of corpses. He sacrifices himself in doing this, and they bid him farewell as he slowly dies underwater.

"Bbbrbrrgggbbb.... I knew I should have just gone back to the mainland and started telling women that I saved these two instead of actually doing it! That would have been in line with my character and also kept me alive!"

So, wait a second. Pause the movie. This represents him finally having the balls to do something brave – all movie long and even in his backstory, he's been a coward who survives only by running away when things get tough. Now, he finally does something brave – and HE DIES INSTANTLY the second he does so! What kind of message is that? Clearly, he should have stuck to being a coward, as that was the best way to stay alive.

I guess that ends the whole thing, as we then see that Eve and Edward now live together and Edward is on his way to becoming a normal kid. I mean okay, there IS that one moment where a picture is shattered on his desk, which might allude to the ghost still being around:

But I think that's just proof that picture frames were in short supply during the war, and this one was just poorly made craftsmanship. I turn up my nose at your shoddy handiwork!

Overall, this was lame. No good character, a story that's been done a thousand times over, and no good scares. The settings, like the first one, are nice – but they rarely use them to their full potential. You can tell they're trying to go for atmosphere, but the movie just shoves your face in these long, dull scenes of the characters walking around in the house – atmosphere can only take you so far. You need something else aside from a creepy setting – I know this might be an unrealistic expectation for a modern horror flick, but how about an actual scary scene? How about trying that?

No? Oh well. I can't wait for the third movie set in the 2000s with a bunch of partying college frat bros staying at the house on a dare. Come on, you know that's what they'll do.

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