Black Roses (1988)

It must have been an interesting time in the 80s when the biggest thing to worry about was the dangers of subversive rock and heavy metal music. Black Roses is a slasher that sort of doubles as a PSA for the PMRC, seeming to posit that maybe heavy metal really IS bad and will make kids kill people! Finally, someone is tackling the real issues!

Director: John Fasano

Starring: John Martin, Sal Viviano

IMDb

This starts off with shots of this band of weird demons, making GWAR look like they could play your corporate holiday party even if only through believability, playing a song… or, rather, miming along as Lizzy Borden’s “Me Against the World” plays. It’s a good song and got my hopes up unjustifiably for the movie. So now I have a bit of a grudge against it. Though, frankly, what I heard of the newer Lizzy Borden material maybe should've clued me in.

Then we’re introduced to your stereotypical small town with a lot of Christian stuff going on like banning rock and roll concerts because they’re Satanic and will destroy the moral fabric of society, etc. One lady, who I believe was a Frankenstein’s monster combined of all the uptight Christian moms of the 70s and 80s and who has probably never known what fun is, just straight up reads some of this band Black Roses’ lyrics out loud. C’mon. You know the delivery is half of it.

But apparently Black Roses are cleared to play the small town anyway – it’s apparently the band’s first live show ever, and they’ve only ever played in the studio and have mysteriously chosen this random backwater town as the location to play for four nights straight or some shit. Well, all of that sounds completely insane, better just greenlight it and let it happen! No red flags!

There’s a bunch of other stuff that happens. Like there’s the high school teacher who spends the whole movie trying and failing to get his students to care about Wordsworth’s poetry. It doesn’t go anywhere. As a bonus, he’s apparently involved in some weird romance with one of his students! This guy becomes the hero of the movie, by the way. This is our moral compass for this grand epic of a film.

I do think the first rock show is funny where the band pretends to be this nice sentimental pop ballad type of band for the first song, only while the adults are in the room – then as soon as the adults go ‘huh I guess this music isn’t that bad’ and leave, the band immediately strips off their clothes revealing skintight black leather, and begin singing about how they’re going to take over the town! But nah, I’m sure the lyrics are just metaphoric. You know - rock and roll at its best is just open to all sorts of interpretations.

The rock shows keep getting weirder and weirder after that – by the end, it’s literally just chanting with red lights like it’s the cult from “Mandy.” Except the guy in that movie played better music than this. Frankly, I know there have been periods where there has been music that got popular that was super avant garde or atmospheric, very removed from what was traditionally popular. But I’m pretty sure this shit isn’t charting. Maybe you should go back to the drawing board.

I guess all of this hypnotizes the kids, and they start all wearing black, acting ruder to their teachers and parents and whatnot. As we know, children have never acted out before. This is totally new behavior as of the late '80s. I'm glad the movie is this socially aware. Then things get even worse and they start killing everyone. The kills aren’t even very good. Like one is a car hitting someone, another is a gunshot to the head. Yeah – real slasher hall of fame shit. I personally want my on-screen deaths to be better.

The main source of morality in all this is the teacher, you know, the guy who has a forbidden romance with a high school girl. Fantastic source of good and bad, I say!

The climax, where the teacher goes and tries to burn down the concert while all the kids are in the building, involves some of the worst CGI you’ve ever seen. It’s seriously like somebody was handed an assignment to make the goofiest looking CGI monsters possible. Like I guess the point of the movie was to show off how the evils of rock and roll were. To me it was just like I’d rather convert back to Christianity than ever see this shit again. Mission accomplished, movie. You won.

Overall the whole thing is complete garbage. Go listen to rock and roll and ignore this whole movie!

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

Bunnyman: Grindhouse Edition (2019)

Well, I had to revive the blog for this one. Thing was, I’ve been looking into some urban legends and found this Bunny Man story kind of interesting. If you don’t know, there were a few incidents back in the 70s of people running across a deranged man in a bunny outfit with an ax, who told them they were trespassing on private property and threatened them. Not much else was ever found out. It’s an interesting story to me because it’s actually some real dude – not a weird mythological creature or some shit like that.

Anyway this movie doesn’t have anything to do with any of that shit.

Director: Carl Lindbergh

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10188162/

Co-written with Michelle.

Apparently this came out in 2011, but was later redone as ‘Bunnyman Grindhouse Edition,’ and it’s absolutely batshit. I mean this makes about 90 percent of what we’ve reviewed on here seem like a milquetoast quaint church program.

The thing starts with a black and white intro explaining how the Bunnyman was burned alive and that’s how he’s the way he is. It’s as dramatic as the intro to a serious dramatic movie, only it’s about a Bunnyman character. Get it? It’s about the juxtaposition. It goes on for several minutes to the point where I was wondering if this wasn’t some kind of Silent Night Deadly Night 2 situation just recounting some movie we haven’t seen.

But nah. It’s basically just this group of weird dead-eyed white 30-somethings driving in the woods with no clear destination – it’s never said. They have no personalities and even the dialogue feels improvised, to the point where it’s like the script probably didn’t have any dialogue at all. I bet the script was just a mysterious rune wrapped in paper that, whenever the actors stared at it, just filled them with the mythical arcane knowledge that time is a flat circle and all of space is a swirling endless stairway to the gods and the Earth and our reality is just a flimsy illusion and our minds would shatter like Christmas ornaments dropped on the ground if we perceived it as it really is, and they just spat out this dialogue as if truly inspired. That’s what I’m going with.

They run across this crazy big truck which tries to run them off the road when they cut him off. They try and confront the driver but the windows are mirrored and the truck just sits there sinisterly. Then they end up crashing their car against nothing on the side of the road. One of the idiots goes under there and fix the car, but the killer comes in the big truck again and gently bumps the back of the car, which somehow rips the one dude’s face off and kills him instantly! What a strong car they have. True triumph for the American auto industry here. It’s 100% more murder-friendly.

From here on out you get some of the insane changes they made apparently – as they wander through the woods hardly even mentioning the horrific murder of their friend, they step into a portal into 70s New York City with a goofy voiceover and vintage B-roll filler overtop? And they appear to be traveling across the globe, with arrows pointing them across oceans to Africa and then Australia?

It’s just really absurd editing. Props to the director. Just taking a fucking hatchet to his own movie and going wild like he’s on acid. It’s actually kind of admirable how utterly insane everything is. Slasher movies weren’t fucking high art. But this thing goes so far off the deep end, it comes around into being brilliant in a weird infinity circle. Just don’t think about it. Just go with the flow. They have an intermission with some weird ads about kidneys or food or some shit like that. It’s just a marvel of absolute weird shit. It's every cliche you ever heard about weirdos just flinging paint at canvasses and creating art. Just a masterclass in utter creation.

Then they’re wandering through the woods aimlessly. They see a bunch of bags of bones in the trees (always a great sign for the country and a thing that feels inviting to me!) and then they come across this random redneck with a gun and a beer. They have a long conversation trying to get this guy to let them use a phone. The guy says he wants to fuck one of the girls in exchange, and one of the guys just keeps ignoring him and repeating the question, asking this redneck if he can use the phone, with the look on his face like he’s a complete newborn who has never had a human interaction before. It goes around and around in circles. The emptiness in the main guy’s eyes is total and terrifying, like a void in outer space. The redneck guy threatens them with the gun and they leave with the other dude saying “fuck you” which seems like a smart thing to do when the other dude has a gun. But who am I to judge?

After wandering for what has to be hours, one girl goes “where are we going?!” Which, to me, that would’ve been a thing I asked before they even started walking, but I guess in the movie’s logic that would be why I’d have died before this by a lot. Who woulda known? She and the one idiot dude from the last paragraph get into a fight and she almost beats his brain out with a rock. Which is funnier to me than a lot of actual comedies. This shit is gold to me. Get it on TV somehow.

There’s another weird intermission cutscene. In this one, a naked chick is killed in the shower by a guy in a bunny costume. I hope she got paid for this, but in reality we all know she didn’t. Then you get a scene where they intentionally, poorly voiced over a bunch of goofy European sounding accents on all the main characters. More surrealism.

After this, it basically turns into a low-rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. There’s really not much else to say. It really becomes a lot less entertaining after this, but I guess there are a few actual moments where it approaches serious scary stuff, with a few nice chase scenes going on and shit like that. But the finale is a pretty annoying attempt to re-do the TCM dinner scene and it just doesn’t work.

But that first half with all the weird edits – man, what art! Flawless. Slasher films becoming everything they were destined to be!

Black Christmas (2019)

If there was anything I was thinking this year, “gee, I wish Blumhouse would do a new Black Christmas remake” was NOT it. But apparently what I want doesn’t matter.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: Sophia Takal

Starring: Imogen Poots, Cary Elwes, Aleyse Shannon

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Essentially, what this is is a bad Twitter argument about rape culture that they spent thousands turning into a movie. It’s really got no interesting insights, and the story is a bunch of crap where all the characters are barely characters so much as mouthpieces spewing all the worst arguments you’ve tuned out online this year. So why is it called Black Christmas? Well, it’s got a sorority house and a killer! That’s enough, right?

They start off with this plot about the main girl Riley, who is still traumatized after a sexual assault by some piece of shit frat guy. I am sure this very serious subject will be handled with exquisite care by this teen slasher movie they’ve created, but then, I am very stupid.

The dialogue is entirely comprised of lines where other characters talk about how much they want to remove the statue of the old racist, sexist slave-owner guy who the school is named after. Oh, and Cary Elwes is a literature professor delivering a big screed about how women are bad and need to submit to men. Then later they talk about how they hate his class because he doesn’t teach any works by women or gay people.

See what I mean? It’s like they just ripped some of the headlines off Twitter. Every fucking line in the movie is like this. If they had anything interesting to say, it’d be one thing. But it comes off like they were just like “we don’t have any ideas… QUICK! TO TWITTER! COPY AND PASTE ALL THE NEWS HEADLINES FROM BREITBART FOR THE VILLAINS’ DIALOGUE!”

Riley does see the frat dudes undergoing what looks like a satanic ritual with red cloaks and a bleeding black-blood statue and all kinds of shit. It’s even in a creepy stone chamber. I’m amazed that nobody sees her, but I guess the frat-bro magic prevents them from even seeing women. Their dick energy is just so powerful that anything else is invisible to them!

You never learned the identity of the killer in the first one and it was one of the better things about it, how fucking eerie it was. In this one, Nathan and I were just like “oh, the frat boys are the killers.” 10 minutes in, and we were right. It’s honestly barely even a spoiler. Scooby Doo would be disappointed in how easy it was to figure this out.

They do this routine on stage basically calling out the frat guys for being rapey pieces of shit. It goes better than anticipated as they get out of there just fine with no altercations. Even the text messages they get are only from the killers threatening them, which, you know, is a given in a slasher movie. These text messages, by the way, are the movie’s replacement for the deranged phone calls from the 1974 original, where the killer constantly made vile threats in voices that would make Regan from The Exorcist blush. In this one, you only get one instance of the creepy voices, and it turns out to be a glitch on an otherwise normal phone call. So lame!

The text messages are just goofy shit. It’s hardly even threatening at all – they read like an incel Batman villain or some shit, just trying way too hard to seem creepy. Boy, so glad it’s not like real life where people get harassed with much more violent, awful language and even real life threats, until they literally leave social media and have to hire bodyguards! It’s all peachy in this movie’s universe.

There’s a scene with Cary Elwes where he threatens Riley to quit speaking out about rape. She manages to accidentally see a piece of paper he’s carrying with the names of a bunch of girls on it. It’s literally right there! These guys are so fucking bad at keeping secrets that I bet when one of them cheats on their girlfriend, they just forward the texts to their girlfriend automatically. Personally I expected way more from a cult of frat bros who worship a statue that bleeds black blood. 

One of the film’s worst parts is the big argument between the girls and the one boyfriend dude. Here are some of the lines spoken: “Not all men are rapists!” “DID YOU JUST ‘NOT ALL MEN’ ME???” It’s really like the dumbest, most infantile argument you’ve seen in the Facebook comments of a Jezebel article about Brett Kavanagh.

Speaking of Kavanagh, the script even fits in the line “I like beer” from the boyfriend character. If this was any less subtle, it would just be a scroll of HuffPo headlines across the screen.

The killers start coming after them with bows and arrows, wearing black cloaks and weird metal masks. At this point I was wondering if anyone involved knew what Black Christmas was – this is more like You’re Next, except it actually makes that movie look like Citizen Kane in comparison. But hey, they have Christmas lights in there!

The final battle takes place in the creepy stone-wall dungeon cult place, as Cary Elwes’ character delivers a big soliloquy about how white men are being oppressed and they need to take back the country from women. He goes on about how white men who agree with them will take seats in “Congress and boardrooms” and says women need to “stay in line.” It’s such a blatant, ridiculous speech that was obviously written as a huge dumb strawman. Even if you’re like me and agree that all these things Elwes’ character is saying are awful and noxious, this writing is just so garishly stupid. It’s like when you dislike someone and try to make them sound as dumb and ridiculous as possible when telling a story about them to your friends, using funny voices and exaggerating the things they said to make them seem much worse.

I don’t even get what their plan is. So they worship this guy from the 1800s who founded their school, who was worried that men would lose their place in society to women? Maybe that guy was just able to see the future. Either way they’re a bunch of misogynists so silly that it’s hard to take seriously. They seem to think they can “restore order” and, what, make women subservient to them? They’re all still in positions of power at this college. 'Women will be subservient to men' is probably gonna be a hard sell for the administrators when things get back to normal in January, buds.

Frankly, we were just waiting for these idiots to come out wearing MAGA hats. But never fear, because the entire gang of sorority girls bust in and kick their asses! It makes that one scene in Avengers Endgame look like a subtle, restrained, literary feminist statement, but on the plus side, the movie is over.

The problem is that the writing is just so fucking bad in this. It’s so one-dimensional that it’s an insult to other very flat things. The characters aren’t characters, so much as they are mouthpieces for either side of an ideology. In the movie’s world, the frat bros are nothing but evil, scratches off Satan’s pube hair, and the girls can do no wrong and basically have zero flaws. It’s just dull, black-and-white shit. I don’t need them to put in sympathetic side to the frat bros, but they sure don’t act like anything but cartoon characters, as it is. And if it’s a cartoon, well, I rarely take cartoons that seriously.

I’d love it if this were an actual good feminist movie – I’m not writing this review to bash feminism or “defend the rights of men” or whatever the Reddit trolls would say. I think that’s actually the worst part of this. The writing is so bad that it involuntarily puts me in the same camp as those alt-right internet douchenozzles who will just hate this because a woman has more than two lines spoken. So, thanks a lot for that one, movie!

PS - The original 1974 film included a plot where the lead woman character was considering an abortion, and it was more interesting and daring than anything this movie tries. Pretty sad!

Image copyright of their original owner; I don't own it.

The Pyramid (2014)

There have been a lot of good horror movies coming out. So many, in fact, that I occasionally go back and watch something fucking stupid to remind myself where I came from. You can’t forget your roots.

Director: Gregory Levasseur

Starring: Ashley Hinshaw, Denis O'Hare

IMDb

The Pyramid is a found footage movie – remember that stupid-ass form of horror? I mean sure, there were a few good ones. This isn’t one of them. I guess it’s about a bunch of archaeologists filming a documentary in Egypt as they’ve found this underground pyramid. The entire country is rioting because of this, by the way, because the discovery disturbed their old spiritual beliefs. You know what I always say; starting off a horror movie with mild racism and xenophobia is always a surefire good idea.

The main characters are all vapid as fuck and barely worth commenting on. There’s a documentary team who are, uh, doing a documentary I guess. Then there’s an archaeologist girl and her father, who argue a lot. Arguing is a good way to show character, right? That’s always a good sign when the bulk of your dialogue is just idiots screaming at one another, makes it real endearing. Oh but they do show a lot of close-ups of the blond archaeologist woman in her underwear – why watch pornography when you can watch movies like The Pyramid? Very minimal titillation followed by underwhelming horror; that’s the way to go.

Like all these movies, there are a bunch of shots of people screaming at them not to film, which adds tension because uh oh, they’re filming anyway! Those incorrigible rebels! They send a robot into the pyramid and it gets attacked by something and goes offline… like true geniuses, they go inside after it despite every indication that just leaving would be better. But hey, anything for science and/or documentary filmmaking – in shitty movies, a person’s job is always 100% of their identity and motivation and they have nothing else going on!

Inside it’s poorly lit and this is the rest of the movie; just these jackasses wandering around in the underground pyramid. There’s at least an hour of movie, if not more, set here, and it becomes apparent that it only has two things to offer: dialogue with the characters screaming at each other that they NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS PYRAMID (‘cause, you know, it wasn’t obvious before) and the two archaeologist characters randomly stopping to recite facts about Egyptian gods and mythology they got off Wikipedia. Seriously, I fucking took a Middle School history class and it was more in depth than this movie made by supposed adults.

So most of this is really just these idiots running around through dimly lit catacombs bickering. Why did they think this would be entertaining? Whose idea of a good time is ‘oh yeah, I’d love to watch a bunch of characters walk around in a dark tomb where I can’t see what’s happening’? Even when you get a brief glimpse of creatures running around in there, or when a character gets sucked into a dark hole by the monster, it’s not scary or interesting. It’s like the whole direction was ‘make sure none of this is compelling.’

It’s like the moments that should be scary aren’t given any more weight than the ones of them just arguing in the hallways. This is a problem common to these found footage things – they have to be real and gritty and so they can’t do any of that cool stuff like, ya know, actually having interesting, well-lit scenes that show you stuff. That isn’t real at all! All those classic horror movies with cool lighting and special effects and scary scenes were for drama club dorks. THIS is the real shit, man! I’m being sarcastic but it really seems like all of this was the mindset here.

Most of the characters die off in awful ways, but that doesn’t stop the archaeologist father and daughter from gawking dumbly at cave paintings and talking about Egyptian history. Wow, the writers can copy-paste from a textbook! Amazing! A few times characters died who I’d thought were already dead. Usually a good sign, when you can’t tell fucking anybody apart. The archaeologists certainly don’t give a fuck – these damn sociopaths wouldn’t notice their own mothers dying if they had a rock with some carvings on it in front of them. What awesome characters! Totally invested! I think The Shining or The Exorcist would’ve been better if they took notes from this movie’s character development, man, just have everyone be bland, soulless and barely act like a real human.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, we get the climax, with Anubis himself making an appearance! Wow, didn’t think they had a real celebrity in the movie. It’s amazing how dumb he looks though. I can actually see why they kept everything so dark for the movie before now. Anubis looks like some kind of third-rate Resident Evil video game villain rip off. It’s like what a very uninspired artist would draw and then be like ‘nah, this is not my best work,’ but then whoops, here come the producers of The Pyramid to steal from your trash can and put it on screen anyway!

Holy fuck this was lame. I don’t think there was anything I’d need to see again. But in fairness, I’ll do the movie a solid and bury it underground so nobody discovers it for the next thousand or so years.

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.

Terrifier (2018)

A few years ago, Damian Leone came out with All Hallow's Eve, a movie about a sadistic clown named Art who really just got his rocks off murdering people for no reason. But the problem was that it was a trilogy of anthology films and didn't just have him killing in a straight line for almost 90 minutes. Now we have Terrifier, which fixes that problem as surely as a master carpenter could.

Director: Damian Leone

Starring: Jenna Kanell, David Howard Thornton, Samantha Scaffidi

IMDb

It's hardly the stuff of master poets. Two young women are drunk and decide to get a bite to eat before trying to drive home. But that's when they meet the guy in the black and white clown costume. He's quiet and smiles a big red bloody smile, and for some reason only the one girl is creeped out. The other one is having fun with it, and although she's supposedly drunk, she doesn't act like it. Just seems more like she's a big clown fan.

The clown kills a bunch of people in the pizza place, which you'd think would be a sort of Switzerland for killers – who doesn't love a pizza place? Fucking savages.

Then he's chasing people around in an abandoned apartment building for some reason. Did he just not have any other plans? I guess it's good that he can think on his feet. He's really quite versatile, using elaborate torture methods for some people and others he just hacks up with a knife. Once, he rides around a little tricycle like the doll from the Saw movies, which I guess is good, we all need cardio. I wonder if he just has some kind of miniature roulette wheel he uses to decide how he'll kill someone. There's certainly no character development, no motive, which is surely an essential thing for an 80s style slasher. I really think they missed an opportunity here to explore the true depth and morality of a killer like Art the Clown, to really dig into his psyche and explain his humanity, that of a man who dresses up in a clown costume and kills people.

Instead, we get a scene where he literally saws a woman in half. Oh well. Different strokes. If you could tell an artist how to create, then it wouldn't really be their art, after all.

The movie chugs along and mostly becomes a fairly cliché slasher. Every trope is used, and by “every trope,” I mean the movie constantly does that thing where they have a character who could help the main girl, but he can't hear for whatever reason, and then the clown kills him from behind as the main girl screams. They do that a lot.

The only real change is the one scene where this crazy delusional homeless woman, who's been walking around with a baby doll all movie, confronts Art and acts like a mother, cradling his head and soothing him. It almost seems like it's going somewhere – but he kills her, as we find out a few scenes later, and as far as I can see she had no positive effect on him. Boy, what a hard sell. Truly stubborn, like a lot of guys his age. It's the tragedy of what society does to men, rendering them incapable of showing feeling except for cutting up horrified murder victims.

At one point he even pulls out a gun and shoots someone. That's just funny to me. This guy with all his fucking knives and weirdo torture methods, and he just has a gun for backup. I hope the NRA is ready to defend this guy's 2nd Amendment rights. I wonder what it was like when he went in to buy the thing. Did he show up in full clown makeup and pull out his wallet and pay with a Visa card? What did the background check come back like? I mean, I'm sure every way he got that gun was totally legit. There's never any issue with that in this country.

Pretty much the rest of it is fairly stock. It ain't terrible, but at the same time, there's just so little imagination to it. It's all just a lot of gory kills like you've already seen. Oh yeah, except the one surviving girl, the sister of one of the other girls who died – try and keep up with me for this Shakespearean plot – gets her face eaten. This ties back to the beginning of the film, in which a snobby newscaster is interviewing her with her face all mangled, and then the disfigured girl tears out the newscaster's eyes. I gotta say this doesn't make much sense. Is the movie trying to say that having a disfigured face and being chased around by a clown for a few hours makes YOU a killer? How offensive to that extremely niche community.

Or maybe she was always a killer and that was a secret twist that even the movie couldn't be bothered showing us! OOOOOooooOOOOOOOooooh! Scary!

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

#Horror (2015)

Well, it's been a hot minute, but we're finally back to doing what we were born to do on this blog – reviewing terrible, never-heard-of-it horror films found in the bowels of Netflix's giant stomach. This week, the one we are looking at is called #Horror. Yes, Hashtag Horror, or, the movie most likely to confuse the fuck out of your elderly aunt who thinks that's still just the pound sign on the phone. But then, isn't confusing elderly people the main aim of all horror movies?

Director: Tara Subkoff

Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Timothy Hutton

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I guess this was directed by artist and fashion designer Tara Subkoff. If that's your thing, great! Personally I did not have an opinion on her one way or the other before this, and now afterwards, I am very confused.

We start off with an old classic for a horror movie: people having sex in a car and then getting murdered! Wow! What a way to set up a story!

Apparently fucking Carmen San Diego is a real fetish... why would she wear that fucking hat?

Then, in a truly inexplicable choice, we see that the credits of the film are a seizure-inducing blend of horrific CGI graphics and garish, cartoonish colors that, I think, are supposed to be the Internet or some sort of app popular with teenagers. I'm guessing the reason it looks like the vomit of a Care Bear who just woke up from a bad hangover is because they couldn't afford better effects – in which case I think they definitely should've saved up more money and then bought the rights to use Facebook and Twitter in their low-budget horror film. It's so simple!

These images brought to you by... I honestly don't know. I've got nothing on this one. This is beyond insane that anyone would put this shit in a movie.

Our main characters include an asshole father who constantly tells his pre-teen daughter Cat to stop playing with her cell phone, and a wealthy lady who spends much of the first 20 minutes of the film whining about the fact that her family is falling apart because her husband is fucking his therapist, or some nonsense like that. They're so dysfunctional that they live in separate wings of their huge mansion and almost never talk to each other. Wow, I'm sure they do a lot of crying into their wads of hundred dollar bills every night. Boo fucking hoo.

The blonde lady is just a caricature of what a rich person is like – she constantly walks around in bathrobe type clothing with her hair up, screams at her clearly hyperventilating and overworked servant to find her phone, which ends up being under the couch she's sitting on. Great scene, five stars!

"Lick my boot, peasant!"

Oh, and all the main characters the movie focuses on the most are teenage girls around 12 to 14 years old – which hasn't been done before either. But maybe that's because it's a terrible idea.

See what I mean?

Seriously – I guess it could work if you had good characters and writing. But this movie just seems to be content with having bad characters and writing. Like, did we need a several-minute long scene of the one girl, Cat, bullying the fat girl at the party? It's like, did they just leave the camera off? Why is this going so long? She tells her to KILL HERSELF for fuck's sake. It hasn't been that long since I was a kid – who are these little sociopaths?!

Oh, and the backstory here involves this guy named Ray Jameison who used to live in the house, who once killed all the people at this party he was hosting because they wouldn't leave! There's your ghost story. Just that. I guess it IS a way to make sure no one COMES to your future parties... but honestly, I'm just amazed that they chose Ray Jameison as the name of the ghost. That's not a ghost name – it's the name of a burnout hippie guitar player who you can find six nights a week in that bar by the beach playing to ten people.

The movie becomes a faceless run of mush after that – a lot of scenes of the girls just talking about bullshit, including one where they point a gun at one another! Glad that one was in there.

Maybe Russian roulette would be a good thing for this movie? Please consider it.

Finally, they kick Cat out after she won't quit bullying the fat girl. I don't know why, though – it isn't like the other girls are any better really; they're all mean as fuck to each other too. They have a few scenes where they're nice to each other, but then by the climax they all hate each other too.

There's some talk about how the fat girl's life is ruined because of stuff posted about her on the internet, and some other scenes where they actually decide to stop looking at their phones. That's actually the least realistic thing in the fucking movie. But then they also have scenes like this one after they lock their phones away:

Movie... please stop. PLEASE STOP!

So really, I am not sure how much of a victory this was at all. Girls, just get your phones out and go blind looking at them. It would be preferable to more of... whatever the fuck this is.

Then Cat's father, Dr. White, shows up – a real asshole, who seems to get off on screaming at little children. He's there, I guess, because his daughter is still missing and the others kicked her out of the house. This leads to him threatening them with a large knife!

I'm sure glad we're dealing with this situation in the best most mature way possible. Phew. What a relief to have a real adult here!

He spends so much goddamn time screaming at these little girls that I think he could've found his daughter by now if he'd actually been doing something constructive. Jesus Christ. This scene also goes on for an inordinately long amount of time and I'm inclined to think Subkoff fell asleep in her chair at some point and the actors just started improvising. Because if THAT wasn't the case, then it means someone watched this and thought it was a good idea to show the world. And that scares me more than most horror movies ever could.

By the blessing of Odin and all the other gods, the guy finally goes away and bothers someone else. That just leaves the girls to start freaking out like the apocalypse is happening. The one fat girl begins to eat cupcakes constantly, and that is all everyone else talks to her about for the rest of the movie, just a constant barrage of fat jokes. Another girl, they think she lied about having sex once, so they just start bashing her for that. DIALOGUE, THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!

Then, mercifully, the killer realizes it's almost the end of the movie, and so starts killing everyone. This happens in extremely interesting and new ways, like their throats getting cut with a knife. Wow, a real Jack the Ripper here. Real original.

Totally unoriginal, 1/5.

Finally, I guess, the killer is revealed to be Cat the whole time, the little girl who they kicked out before. Woah, I totally couldn't see that one coming! But then again, I am an idiot. She then kills herself with a gun in the driveway of the house, which is really the ending this miserable fucking movie deserved all along.

Oh, except for the insanely trite ending where they have a bunch of fake news clips about how there were a lot of people watching and doing nothing except taking videos on their phones for social media. What incisive social commentary! You are the new George Orwell! What a fucking genius you are, and everyone should immediately blow you right now.

What was the point of any of this? It was long, boring and had almost no story structure, to the point where it was hard to even write about what happened scene to scene. The whole plotline about Ray Jameison the ghost went absolutely nowhere since it turned out to be a real person killing everyone. If it was supposed to be social commentary about people being on their phones, what was it really trying to say? It's totally a muddled message because they don't do anything with it beyond have the kids USING their phones. Not exactly a biting social satire.

I guess it was supposed to be about cyberbullying? I don't know. I can see it now that I've read the Wikipedia page, but honestly, it didn't come across very well in the film. I appreciate the attempt to tackle a real world issue, but it came off as muddled and confused the way the film did it. I didn't like or sympathize with any characters, either, which could've helped in a movie about bullying victims...

So what are we left with in #Horror? A really dumb title and an excruciatingly boring, annoying film. I guess you should see it if you want to know what a bad movie looks like? Either that, or if you've watched literally everything else on Netflix.

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

Chopping Mall (1986)

With the decline of malls on the horizon, it makes sense to go back and check out either the greatest monument to malls or the reason for their decline – Chopping Mall.

Director: Jim Wynorski

Starring: Allison Parks, Tony O'Dell

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

This was a 1986 movie, which means it was likely made after the director took a huge hit of cocaine, brushed back his mullet and then let a ripping guitar solo play on the electric guitar he keeps in his office at all times. That, I believe, is pretty much how all 80s movies were made. And if you think it's exaggerated or stereotypical to say that, well, just watch this actual fucking movie.

The whole premise of this is that this mall has upgraded its security system to an army of robots that can shoot lasers and electrifying cords out of them as an attempt to stop burglars. Who is trying to rob this mall? James Bond villains? The X-Men? I think if you're getting to the point that you need killer robots to stop a couple of delinquent kids from taking a few things from RadioShack and JCPenney, you need to re-evaluate just how bad your actual human security is.

You know there's probably real people you could hire who could just grab them by the arm and throw them out of the mall – you don't need to electrocute them with fucking robots, you psychopath.

Oh, is it over already? Wow. Shortest horror flick ever...

Being an 80s movie, this is of course full of a bunch of teenagers who want to have sex – that's the entire cast of main characters. Do you need to know their names? I could just refer to them as 'amorphous blob of hormonally crazed 80s teens' and you'd get the gist well enough. Of course they all have names, but even so, is anyone going to remember them? I think not.

"My eyes are up here!" 

There's also the cliché guy and girl who are shy virgins and who need the guidance of these de facto Cupids to guide them to the sweet, sweet fields of bliss – for how could they ever do so on their own, as two-left-foot bumbling no-social-skills freaks as they are? They NEEDED the help of these generous philanthropists of love to steer them in the right direction. What modern day Saints these other kids are! Truly, they're the most generous people ever to walk the Earth.

Eh, actually it's probably a nice thing to do.

Meanwhile, the scientist guy charged with sitting alone in a lab all night by himself for God knows what reason looks at porn! And I guess that was the last straw for these killer robots, who I guess got imbued with Jason Voorhees DNA and now want to kill anyone that indulges in sexuality. What a cool trick. Anyway, they kill the scientist guy, which I'm sure was part of their protocol – once you're completed, kill your master. The cover-up is complete. No one will ever know! Bwahahaha!

If this guy was smart, he would have invented the internet to look at porn, instead of inventing killer robots that killed him while he looked at porn. What a doofus.

They also kill a second scientist who comes in and also gets killed immediately, and I'm honestly not sure why this was put in the movie. Was killing the one guy just not enough? Would the audience not GET IT if the robot didn't kill two scientists instead of just the one?

Then the robots are unleashed on the mall, where the teenagers have forgone having sex and are instead having meaningful philosophical conversations about the state of the world. Just kidding, they're actually having sex. Man, really had you going there for a second, huh?

Honestly, it goes about how you'd expect – right down to the nerdy guy and girl just sitting there watching old 50s monster movies while everyone else has sex. What a couple of fucking dorks.

Does this hit too close to home for me? Shut up.

The trouble starts when a sassy janitor is cleaning the floors, by dipping his mop in the dirty water he's already used – real good strategy there, bucko. But then a robot knocks over the chemicals all over the tile floor, making a huge mess. When the janitor gets mad, the robot responds by doing what I am sure it was programmed to do when those lowly janitors step out of line – it electrocutes the guy to death.

Yeaaaaahhhhh! Put that fucking janitor back in HIS PLACE!

Then it goes after a girl who just had sex and is walking around the mall alone – clearly, the prime target these robots were made for. It chases her through the dark mall a bit and then, right when her friends are watching from the window, it blows up her head in what I'm sure it thought was a beautiful, dazzling fireworks display, and was subsequently sad when the kids just screamed in horror and didn't appreciate it.

B+.

That's probably why the robots keep chasing them for the rest of the movie. They have feelings too, ya know.

Then the movie subsequently turns into a Rambo-style action movie with the kids grabbing a bunch of guns and fighting robots. They sell guns in the fucking mall? Now I am starting to see why they needed killer robots in there.

Also, I love how the guys tell the girls to just escape while they fight the robots, as if fighting robots is something drawn down by gender lines. Pfft! Women can do anything men can do! That's why the girls double back and join the guys fighting the robots and---

Oh. Well, never mind. I take it back – there IS a reason only the men were fighting.

Also, gotta love how no one stepped in to try and help that girl as she was burning alive. Couldn't have at least thrown a blanket on her and put the fire out, huh? Were they just thinking beauty was the only thing she was good for and now that her body would be covered in burn scars, she might as well just die? That's pretty cold.

And the robots didn't kill anyone else while she was burning or do anything except sit there and watch – how fucking considerate of them. That COULD HAVE been a great opportunity for the others to get the drop on them, but oh well, you live and learn.

The robots continue to chase the surviving kids through the mall, killing them one by one, and somehow they don't use the lasers they have at all when that could easily kill off all the kids in a few seconds. Instead they just sort of chase them and prolong things for no reason. I really expected better writing and logic from a movie called Chopping Mall, so this is hugely disappointing.

They have a bit of downtime in this restaurant portion of the mall, where one of the kids – the boyfriend of that girl who got set on fire – is now super cynical and says he wants to die. The robots grant him that wish. See, they aren't that bad after all.

"Heh heh heh... I want to die."

In a truly epic battle, the nerdy guy faces off against one robot and shoots at it several times with a gun. When that doesn't work, he tries throwing the gun at the robot, I suppose thinking that throwing a gun would just be the thing's weakness and somehow cripple it. Or maybe that's just fucking dumb. The robot thinks so, too, and so it throws a trash can at him which hits him in the gut, knocking him off his feet. It's one of the funniest parts of the movie.

"I really wish I had the gun back now, even if only for the illusion of safety!"

I was really, honestly hoping he died from this – that would make it even funnier to my fucked up mind. But nope, he's back later and actually OK in the end. Damn it.

Meanwhile, though, the final surviving girl is chased into a pet store where snakes and spiders crawl all over her. She ends up killing the final robot by pouring paint on the floor so the robot gets stuck, and then throwing a road flare at it and exploding it in a blaze of fire. You know, the usual plan for killing robots.

I am almost positive the robot was trying to communicate with her the whole time that it was just trying to be her friend and that it meant no harm. Maybe its lasers were malfunctioning and it thought they were tools used to shake hands and hug. Maybe the robots were sentient and loving creatures trying to be our friends, and we ruined that opportunity forever.

But eh, probably not! Woohoo, we won! The humans have conquered that which is inhuman! The mall is safe again!

I assume after the movie ends, the final girl is arrested for destruction of property and breaking and entering into the mall after hours, and the guys who green-lit the robots are thrown into jail for the rest of their lives for making a bunch of killing machines. Then every year on the anniversary of the massacre, the country has a day of silence and mourns the victims by lighting candles and sending them down the river, bemoaning those young teens lost in the prime of their lives who were actually 27-year-olds miscast in an 80s movie.

But even so. They will live on in our memory.

Yeah, I think that's about accurate. This was Chopping Mall! See you next time.

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

The Bye Bye Man (2017)

The Bye Bye Man is a movie that I feel ashamed and embarrassed to even talk about the name of, which is actually a new low for this blog. It sounds like something a two-year-old would come up with on the spot when asked for a good supervillain name and then later go 'nah, that's actually kind of dumb, forget it' – so I guess that makes it good enough for the low standards of mainstream horror movies!

Director: Stacy Title

Starring: Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

This is basically an incomprehensible mess of a movie that's hard to describe properly if you don't already know about it. It's based on a short nonfiction ghost story, which is weird because I am positive the target demographic for this movie can't read.

It starts off with a guy in 1969 killing all his friends and family with a shotgun in broad daylight, while shouting “Don't think about it, don't say it.” You know, when they said anybody could buy a gun in America, I didn't think it meant literally ANYBODY... I highly doubt even the most pro-2A asshats in the south would look at this guy and go 'okay, give him a gun right now.'

Then there's a bunch of young college kids in the present day, a couple, Elliot and Sasha, and the guy's best friend John, moving into a really big old house. Things are pretty good for a while, which as you know, is never a deceptive thing in a horror movie; they always stay the same and everything's cool.

They have a party at the house where John is grinding up on Sasha at a dance, which will play an important role in the plot just as much as the actual supernatural killings – yes, seriously. Elliot is, I guess, afraid that Sasha and John are having sex behind his back, but it's not a well done plotline at all. That's what you get for expecting good nuanced drama from a movie called the fucking Bye Bye Man...

But Elliot isn't too bummed out, because he finds a weird old desk in their room with some cliché crazy-guy scrawled writing in it that says “Don't think it, don't say it” spiraled around in circles over and over, and he really admires the craftsmanship it took to write that way for whatever reason – seriously, it can't be easy! Then he peels off that layer to get to the other layer in the desk (what an elaborately put together desk drawer for no reason!) and sees THE BYE BYE MAN carved super deep in it...

Which is weird, as the main plot point is that if you don't think about or talk about him, he won't show up. Yet the word is very clearly scrawled on the desk by the same guy who wrote “don't think about it, don't talk about it.” Nice job at screwing up your own warning there, douchebag! I guess, as the crazy scrawled writing indicates, he's just KUH-RAZY and that excuses everything. Lol, mental illness, am I right?

Being mentally ill gives you the special superpower to write like this for no reason.

But as we'll see throughout the film, the warning to not think or say the name to avoid being possessed by him is constantly preceded with characters – almost all of them every time – doing exactly that. What a bunch of idiots. Don't you know that saying not to think about something will make people think EXACTLY of that thing? It isn't exactly a new psychological phenomenon. If I say 'hey, don't think about a dog wearing a sailor's suit smoking a joint,' that's what you'll fucking think about. See? You're thinking about that right now.

Eh, it's close enough anyway.

The plot stumbles along as they recruit a psychic girl and spent an inordinately long amount of time trying to make her prove she's actually psychic. It's utterly pointless and dumb. She eventually does this séance thing with them where she gets attacked somehow by the Bye Bye Man – so, I guess we're supposed to be scared? Not really... I've seen this scene in a bunch of other movies.

"I've got this great idea... how about we film a scene in this ghost story horror movie where they have a seance? Isn't that such an innovative idea?" "No, Janet, you're drunk." "Too late, already filmed it!"

If this all seems confusing and stupid, don't worry, we just have the entire rest of the fucking movie. The characters start to see all kinds of hallucinations, like weird images in glass or mirrors or in the dark – what novel ideas, never seen that in a horror movie. My favorite dumb thing is when Elliot keeps waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a cloaked figure in the dark, but then it turns out to just be the creepy child molester-looking cloak he always hangs up in that spot, and he's seeing things. Whoops! Guess hanging THAT there was a bad idea!

"I could just move that cloak, but eh, I like shitting my pants out of fear at 3 a.m."

Also, Sasha gets mysteriously sick for some reason... it's never really explained exactly why, just that it's got to do with the Bye Bye Man. This lasts most of the whole movie, and no one seems to give one single shit about taking her to a doctor. She doesn't even go there herself – are doctors a foreign concept? Is she some kind of flower child who doesn't believe in that? I dunno, and the movie doesn't. I do like how Elliot seems to care more about whether she's fucking his best friend than how sick she is. What a tepid douchenozzle!

The rest of the movie is a soggy oatmeal-like slog through the same old crap – a bunch of scenes of Elliot researching the Bye Bye Man, which is inexplicably in the school library in a file that turns out to be nothing but that name scrawled in that crazy-people font swirled around and around like it's being flushed down the toilet. Why is that in the school library? Just so fucking weird.

There's also a black lady librarian who acts like the most cliché stereotypical black woman ever, who relays the story to Elliot in the most casual way possible and makes it sound as dumb as it actually is – apparently, some journalist named Larry covered the story of a kid who killed his family and said the Bye Bye Man did it, and then it infected Larry too, and he was the guy who killed his family in the beginning of the movie!

Except, wait, if Larry wrote about the Bye Bye Man in a story, how did no one else get infected but him? Nobody at his news office heard the name ever, not even his editor? If that librarian lady knew about it, why was she OK until now? There are so many plotholes in this movie it'd be harder to just find a part that actually made sense.

The entire plot pretty much just revolves around these characters seeing these hallucinations and being scared of them. But at the same time, they also know what the Bye Bye Man is and that none of it is real – they talk many times about how they're probably going crazy. So how the hell do they keep falling for the hallucinations? Do they have the memory span of goldfish? It sure would've been more interesting if they could have helped each other not fall for the hallucinations and had, uh, character development, but I guess I'M crazy to expect that.

"Yup...pretty sure THIS is really happening..." - every fucking character in this movie

Like, the crazy psychic goth girl is in the car with Elliot and sees an illusion of a bloodied-up family on the side of the road that has been in a car crash. He can't see it, but she's convinced it's real despite all the conversations about how they're seeing things, and gets out of the car to go help, running in front of a moving train, which kills her instantly. What an idiot. I'm glad she's dead.

"I was going to run ACROSS the tracks to help that family, but I just thought the front of this train was so pretty that I had to stop and take a look! I really like the Final Destination movies, too, which was the real inspiration for this stunt."

The rest of the movie after this is mostly just Elliot looking extremely pale and shivering all the time, because why bother writing a good character when you can just do these things to make him seem nervous? It's so over the top it's like he got left in a freezer overnight and they let him out in the morning – somebody look into the human rights violations this director may have committed!

Anyway, he goes to visit the aging wife of Larry the journalist, who tells him an extremely pointless flashback about how she came home to find Larry going crazy and writing shit on the walls about the Bye Bye Man. It's really just completely pointless... there's nothing in this flashback we haven't already seen, and it feels weird to have it placed at this point in the film when we should be at the climax. Except that apparently people who snap and lose their minds only happen because of the Bye Bye Man! Mental illness is just hilarious, right?

I guess there is one positive to this scene, though – it does give us a hilarious moment in Elliot realizing not being scared of the monster is the only way to beat it, so he stands there in the dark shouting at nothing like a crazy person. You have to admire the lengths he's gone to for this method acting; a complete forsaking of dignity and class altogether.

The climax is a dragging mess full of a lot more dumb hallucination scares from characters who should know what they're seeing is fake by now. Both Sasha and John end up dead as a result of it. The Bye Bye Man himself shows up more often and he just looks like a homeless zombie wearing a bad coat. He looks like Freddy Krueger after a bad string of days on meth.

"Hey bro, can you spare a buck or two? Need to catch a bus back to nightmare-world."

Then Elliot's brother and niece show up, inexplicably, right as he kills himself, and the niece sees the writing of the name in that desk from earlier so she's infected now, I guess. Oh no! But as she doesn't even know how to read, it has no effect. So like the entire movie, this sequence was pointless.

So this was, uh, not good. But aside from the horrible characters, plot, special effects, writing, directing and most other things about it, maybe you can find something to like.

Seriously – it's horrible. The plot is muddled and makes no sense, and the attempt at making a new “arch horror villain” like Freddy Krueger or Jason just falls flat because of that. There's a lot of nonsense about magical gold coins and how seeing or hearing his name infects you, but none of it is explained well or tied together. The characters are non-entities and the writing is so bad that even the attempt at very meager development – the whole 'is my girlfriend cheating on me' thing – just comes off as a distraction rather than something humane or interesting.

Honestly, the whole thing just feels so incoherent and incomprehensible that it's gibberish. It's like listening to a drunk at a bar telling you a story at 3 am after they've had eight shots of tequila – you just get more confused the longer it goes.

On the plus side, I won't have to think about the Bye Bye Man anymore, as I've written the name so much that I'm sure to go so insane that I won't remember this movie. So there's that!

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