Dark Spirits (2008)

Dark Spirits is a movie about a chick whose sister dies from some mysterious supernatural force and she has to figure out why it’s haunting her, too. The problem is that by the end, the audience still has no real clue. This was part of a box set of DVD movies from Walmart my friend found in his apartment, so you know it’ll be amazing!

Director: Huck Keppler

Starring: Milena Minichova

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

The movie starts essentially like the 2003 classic The Room – which is to say, exactly like a porno, with bad lighting and camerawork, and two people having sex, except unfortunately here mostly with their clothes on. There’s really no difference other than that, though. The main girl Eva calls her sister later, who is a totally random woman who the movie wants us to believe is super close with her. The reason is to tell her sister that she had a dream of her walking into some desolate country house, like a bargain bin Texas Chainsaw, and getting grabbed by a ghost! You know – normal sister stuff!

Her sister is understandably skeptical – like, she probably heard this stuff every week while the main chick was in college and friends with that weird gypsy girl who had all the tea leaves and tarot cards and she's kinda done with it after all these years.

Then, the next morning, her boyfriend walks up extremely slowly to let her know her sister is dead – boy, was that fast. She takes it about like anyone would, with some crying and sitting at a table and whatnot – your usual bland depictions of sorrow. The Store Brand Box depictions of sorrow, really. There’s nothing at all in terms of who she is as a character. All she does the entire movie, really, is sit around an impressively bland apartment and write in a notebook. Thrilling stuff! Her apartment is so un-adorned and bland that I suspect she might be a serial murderer using it as a patsy for unsuspecting victims. Unfortunately the movie does not seize on this potential plot goldmine.

But don’t worry – there are plenty of weird scenes of her interacting with her boyfriend talking about different dimensions. And talking with some girl and a random homeless man about the concept of death or something. It’s seriously like they just took pages from a Philosophy 101 textbook and threw it hodge-podge into a screenplay. It has nothing really to do with the story.

So what IS the story? Well, I guess she keeps seeing ghosts and some mildly weird stuff happens to her. A few scares in the dark. But it’s not too bad, considering all the stuff that happens to people in better horror movies. This is kind of like the white privilege of horror movies. I think maybe the worst part is when she gets chased through the park by the homeless guy. But the next day, no kidding, he apologizes to her. What a good turnout! I wish more movie conflicts ended that way!

That stuff is positively rosy compared to how she is with her boyfriend, though – watch as these two barely actually touch each other and act mostly like two awkward people who were asked to act like they’re in a relationship. Amazing! It’s like I’m inside of a high school prom. Real interactive content.

Also, some detective shows up a few times, with the actor clearly stoned on camera. Why can’t he solve this crime? What are they paying him? I have some legitimate questions. His story essentially goes nowhere and, near the end of the movie, he gets killed by a ghost. Or maybe it’s not a ghost – it’s not really all that clear.

The main girl comes home and she sees her own dead body on the floor of the apartment. Wow! She should’ve cleaned that up! Then, I guess, she dies too, and is able to meet her dead sister in the ghost world. Given that these two characters acted stiff and cold toward each other already as if they barely knew each other, my guess is it’ll be exactly like they’re used to. I wonder what wacky ghost adventures they’ll go on. Hopefully it’ll be more interesting than this movie.

This was mostly harmless. I actually do like seeing low budget stuff like this and watching how people try to construct something scary – at least, it’s not some calculated corporate garbage. There is that. But it’s just not very good. It’s too slow and lacks any kind of compelling characters. It was kind of fun to see where it went, but the payoff was lacking. See it if you’ve got a bottomless appetite for this kind of fun schlock.

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

Cinema Freaks Live: A Ghost Story (2017)

Here's our Cinema Freaks Live video for the movie 'A Ghost Story.' I've been preoccupied with other things like the pursuit of money to pay bills and shit lately. So I hope this will tide people over. More reviews soon!

Unrest (2006)

Unrest is a movie about medical students doing the kind of stuff they do, which is awesome. I'm glad we finally have a movie that doesn't marginalize them, and fully shows their true identities as detectives who figure out why ghosts are haunting the place. That's just what I wanted.

Director: Jason Todd Ipson

Starring: Corri English, Scot Davis

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was one of the Eight Films to Die For series that mostly polluted Blockbuster shelves a lot back in the 2000s. I don't know why they were 'to die for.' Honestly, a lot of them were pretty middling in quality and I doubt anyone would throw themselves on a sword for these movies or run back into a burning house to grab them. The only way someone might DIE for a movie like Unrest is if you dropped it in the street in front of your house while going to throw it in the garbage, and then the garbage truck hit and killed you.

Also, I'm pretty sure these movies were the reason Blockbuster shut down. That's a bit of a conspiracy theory, but trust me on this.

The film starts out with a couple of doofus coroners checking out the tits on this body that just came in. In these kinds of movies, there's never a point where they DON'T make dumb jokes about how hot a woman corpse is – it's like some kind of fucking rite of passage to be a bad horror movie coroner.

"Alright, Jim. Are you ready to spew this uninspired dialogue?"

Then we get our main character, a blonde med student who apparently lives in the janitor closet in the hospital. We find out later this is because her grant money hasn't come in, but honestly I think it's because she's a millennial and this seems like luxury to her compared to the actual apartments she's lived in. Woohoo, housing market!

"This is the nicest place I've ever slept in!"

The first day of class, we find out med school is really just a wacky, fun place where students do things like push down on a corpse to squirt corpse juice into the mouths of their fellow students! I'm sure that won't cause any random disease outbreaks or horrific Resident Evil or Walking Dead style disease. Seriously, how did nobody get expelled from school for shit like this?

Amidst that is the one guy in their group constantly flirting with her and trying to get her to fuck him. I guess this is to be expected – I mean, that IS what women go to these schools for, right? I like how they tell her not to get too personal when she starts wondering about what happened to cause the strange wounds on the corpse's body. Because the GUYS weren't being weird at all when they said she was into kinky bondage sex, but an honest wondering about what happened to her is “too personal.” Sure.

One of the other guys has a fiance who comes by and wants to see one of the bodies. I guess this is why she was with him – she was just biding her time for when he was actually in a place where he'd let her touch a body with her bare hands. Because yeah, that's what she does, just touches this dead body with her bare hands. Is every character in this thing just willingly going to spread the virus that kills all of humanity and turns the world into some dystopia hellhole? 'Cause touching magic enchanted corpses is kind of how you do that.

Then, like clockwork, she runs out in the hallway feeling ill, and when her fiance finds her, she's dead and there's blood all over the floor somehow.

Oh no, she died from... some unexplained thing we'll never go back to, but it has to do with that corpse I guess!

On Monday, everyone just comes back to class like normal... somehow the fact that a woman died for vague reasons after touching a corpse never caused any alarm, because no one knows about it until the professor comes up to their group in class and privately tells them about it. Like what, is people dying in this hospital from inappropriate contact with corpses so prevalent that it barely even registers anymore? I think this scene raises more questions than answers, but then again, people have always accused me of thinking too hard!

The main girl, apparently cursed to be in possession of actual brain cells, thinks there's something weird about the corpse that people die after touching. She tells her professor about it, and he just dismisses her as crazy – just one of those kuh-razy women, with their weirdo theories and estrogen and what not. I'm sure he's right and it's all fine, and the rest of the movie is here for no reason except to show her happily becoming a doctor.

"I'm just the stereotypical stick in the mud character here to step on your dreams."

I guess she takes a break from wondering about that to go out with that other guy and have sex with him. Which is, you know, fine, but why are we watching a movie about it? Is this movie under the impression that these characters are rich and interesting enough that we want to see what they do in the bedroom? Because I dunno about you, but I am thinking no.

There are some more scenes of the girl trying to figure out what happened to this corpse – because I guess med students are just doing the jobs of detectives now. That's what budget cuts do to you, I suppose. I wonder what the scene was like where the real cops found this body and apparently did no investigating on it at all...

DETECTIVE 1: We found a body out in the field! It's naked and all cut up with scars and cuts!

DETECTIVE 2: Really? Well, that is just super fucking boring.

DETECTIVE 1: Yeah, you're right. Just dump it in the coroner van and forget it. Now let's go down to the bar and pick up chicks and not investigate this at all!

DETECTIVE 2: Woohoo, it's fucking awesome being a detective!

The rest of the movie is mostly taken up by the same old cliché crap you expect from these movies – main girl talks to this older woman at the school who believes her about the corpse being supernatural, and plenty of more scenes of researching why everything is happening, combined with random sex and flirting scenes of main girl and whatever-his-name-is. It's like they just put together an Ad Libs version of a horror movie. I guess none of it is TOO bad, but is that really an accomplishment? Just not being AS bad as other bullshit movies?

I do like this one part where they figure out that the corpse is actually from an Aztec temple or something down in Brazil. They ask the one Spanish guy they know to help them translate their Portugese research documents, and he says Brazilians don't speak Spanish, so he can't help. They tell him his Spanish is still better than their not knowing of any other language – what a bunch of racists. But it turns out they're right and he's able to tell them exactly what they need to know. Because stupidity is all encompassing.

Then we find out that the woman used to be an archaeologist until she went to this ancient burial site in South America, at which point she became a prostitute and started killing her johns after giving them blowjobs. Wow. Had to find some way to fit a prostitute in there, huh? I love that it doesn't even really matter – she could've been anything and still had the main plot of killing people in this hospital. But they went nope, prostitute is the job most women have, so we gotta go with that!

"Bad lighting, no character, no plot. 1/10. This movie sucks."

The Spanish guy dies next, and the ghost is at least courteous enough to give him a warning:

I hope the ghost paid for that textbook she defaced...

Oh, and the next day, NOW everyone notices the dead body on campus... I guess this one was just more noticeable and stood out more.

Throughout all of this, the British doctor guy teaching the class staunchly refuses to do anything or consider that something supernatural might be going on. There have been like five deaths in this movie and he still is just like “how dare you think there's some connection between this and that corpse we brought in JUST before they started?” I guess life is easier when you're just a fucking moron. They finally make him get rid of it, and he says he does...

BUT... it turns out he didn't, and instead just tossed it in the tank full of body parts in the lab, like nobody would ever fucking notice. Then people keep dying and it's like, whoops. But at least our heroes are here to try and get the body out – by taking their shirts off.

Why are they doing that? Like, you're already dipping into nasty corpse water anyway. Who cares if your scrubs get dirty? Are those the only ones you were allowed to have, so you have to make sure they don't get dirty? That's what budget cuts do to you, I guess. Or it could just be because of boobs. I dunno.

They finally burn the body and take its ashes all the way to fucking Brazil to bury – how they got there, I don't know. I mean the girl was sleeping in the hospital because she didn't have any money. Did they sleep in the luggage bay of the plane for really cheap?

But they scatter the ashes, only to realize a second later that the spirit is actually, maybe, still back in the lab! DUN DUN DUN... oh, wait, they have no basis to think that and it's actually just sort of random. I love that they're not even 100 percent sure - they just kinda THINK the spirit could still be there. What a half-assed cliffhanger. It's like the agnosticism of movies - you're not really sure and it's all very wishy-washy and noncommittal.

That was Unrest, the frankly kinda dull movie about corpse superpowers and people dying in a hospital! What did we think of it? Eh. That's really about it – just, “eh.” It wasn't the worst thing ever, but there wasn't much of interest. I mean, a few mildly silly things happened, and there were some odd plot decisions, but it was hardly like the new The Room or Troll 2 or anything, so it couldn't even succeed on that front. It was just sort of a middle of the road, bland adventure. So unless you really want to see, uh, people dying in a hospital but from ghosts instead of medical causes... you probably won't love this movie.

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.

Cinema Freaks Live: Ghostbusters (2016)

Well, the new Ghostbusters movie is out, after all the months and months of online wars and sexism and misogyny and a whole bunch of other undeserved crap thrown at the fact that a beloved 80s classic was being remade with four women. And after all the drama, all the threats of the world ending because of this film's existence, how did this movie hold up?

It's pretty solid.

Director: Paul Feig
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

If you want more than that, check out the video my friend Nathan and I did about it. It's the first time we've tried this, and it probably isn't going to look that good after we do more later. But check it out anyway. There are also SPOILERS in it!

(You can also check out our original attempt here, which didn't work because I fucked up on how my camera worked, and it cut off before we were done filming. But it's still a good watch in some ways.)

It was just a fun movie. Nothing great, and the plot was a bit thin and the villain a bit too lame and not every joke hit. But more jokes hit than not. And I liked the new Ghostbusters. A lot. All of them do a good job and they add charisma to it. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy have a good amount of chemistry, Leslie Jones is a huge presence on screen and Kate McKinnon is a shitload of fun to watch. I wanted to know more about these characters, and like The Force Awakens, the fact that they're totally new and original characters lends the movie a freshness and spontaneity it wouldn't have if it were a straight up remake. So they were enough to save any minor failings the rest of the movie had, and I dug it. Was a fun time.

I think the energy it had really carried above and beyond what it would have been otherwise – if this movie had felt too sluggish or boorish, it would've just felt like a slog to get through. But the energy and verve this movie had was infectious as hell. It really worked. Even the more pedestrian moments just had this crackling, lively feel and it coasted along nicely and I wasn't bored. Pacing and energy are important. This movie succeeded at them.

I wouldn't even really have much to say about this film aside from 'I liked it' if not for all the 'controversial' nonsense surrounding it. I can't even believe all the shit this movie got, and most of it for the all-women angle. It's the dumbest thing ever. This movie is not pushing some feminist angle, and just having women as the main characters doesn't make it some sort of weird political statement – fuck that line of thought. Is having any type of person in a movie aside from a white guy a political statement then? It's not. This is not political at all. It's just a fun film. I also love all the people moaning about Chris Hemsworth's character being a dumb eye-candy type of character that the women swoon over at some parts of the movie. There are so many movies where women fulfill that role the other 95% of the time and ignore movies that actually have developed characters. I hardly think one movie to the contrary is going to destroy the fabric of cinema.

A special fuck-you to human dumpster fire Milo Yiannapolous and his equally shitty website Breitbart. If you don't know them, it's a “journalism” website in the way that the dumpster behind the McDonalds in your town is fine dining. Yiannapolous constantly insults every demographic he can and then whines and whines about “political correctness” and “censorship” when people ban him from places. It's trolling, and not any sort of funny trolling. I bring this up at all because they recently had a campaign against Leslie Jones of the movie, hurling all sorts of deplorable racist insults against them. Just awful, awful stuff.

Luckily, she's better than them. And this movie is better than anything these assholes can shit out.

And that's why I'm making a point of defending this movie. Not just because it's good, but because it's worth speaking out against nonsense hate-mongering and misogyny. And seriously, guys. It's a movie. It's not fucking Selma or The Help or something, it's Ghostbusters – this much vitriol and controversy over politics in it is insane. Just get over it. It's a good, fun movie. Just go have fun with it.

Image copyright of its original owners, we own none of them.

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

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

Director: Tom Elkins

Starring: Abigail Spencer, Chad Michael Murray

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I trending yet? Sweet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just wait until history class in a few years!

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

Welcome to 2016, guys!

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

Exeter (2015)

The month of October is over, and we're all hungover from horror films. So what to do now? I mean, I don't even want to see a horror movie right now. I need a fucking break. My head is spinning from all the gore and suspense and terror. Luckily, this movie, Exeter, has absolutely nothing scary or cool in it, so this shouldn't be too hard to sit through.

Oh who am I kidding, of course it will be.

Director: Marcus Nispel

Starring: Kelly Blatz, Brittany Curran

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This movie starts out with something nice and considerate – a depiction of exactly the state you need to be in to enjoy the movie:

That's right, you have to be a member of the cast of Requiem for a Dream.

How nice of it; a sort of tutorial. What a thoughtful movie.

Then we get a black and white exposition dump told in the way of an old documentary. Apparently there was a mental hospital years ago that burned kids alive, or something like that. Snooooooooore.

Then we get our main characters, a bunch of douchey high school morons who want to have a party at the place years later. Our main character is Patrick, or I think that's his name; a wimp who sucks at everything. I say that because he is working with a church to refurbish the place and on the first day of doing that, he decided to invite every kid in a hundred miles to come destroy the place for a party. I mostly find it highly dubious that he managed to get that many fucking people to come. I very, very highly doubt he's that popular or likable, movie.

He's friends with a couple of douchenozzles who talk about nothing but having sex with random chicks. They see one of them from behind and talk about how hot she is and how Patrick should go talk to her. I just find it depressing that they introduced the main girl in the movie by showing her ass first, without even showing us her face yet, and the main characters ogling her. What a piece of shit this is.

Unless she's going to talk with her ass Ace Ventura style, I don't think this is a viable way of introducing a character.

So the party drags on all night and well into the morning, and I guess none of these bungholes has anything else to do. Patrick and the girl go outside and have a ridiculously poor talk about their personal lives, where we learn they have broken families and yadda yadda. Who gives a fuck? This movie trying to emote is like a crack whore trying to relate to you.

"Blahblahblahblabla."
"Hurr durr derr."
-Pretty accurate for this scene...

If you think that last bit is harsh, well, I'm sorry if I can't get into the “touching” scenes when the next scene you see is them performing fake exorcisms just for shits and giggles. Something tells me these characters are the types of people who stick their tongues into electrical sockets to see what happens.

Anyway, yeah, so the little brother character, Rory, somehow ends up possessed from their fake exorcism game thing. Which the main characters are surprisingly cool with and don't need to think about at all before realizing that. Patrick just instantly knows, and doesn't question it even a little, and the girl says they don't need a hospital, they need a priest! Somebody put these detectives on the case. Nothing gets past them!

"This really reaffirms my suspicions that demonic possession is real!"

The group spends a lot of time just wandering around arguing about what to do. One guy says over and over that there's no such thing as possession, but then immediately reverts that position when he sees Rory. What a pussy. I love the scenes where he's raving about how Christianity is fake and possession is a lie, but then like, ten minutes later he's hugging a big cross like a baby. Fuck that guy.

They all try to figure out how to beat the demon, and the best they can come up with is watching a Youtube video about how to perform an exorcism. I would make fun of this, but honestly, the brain mash required to come up with this sequence is so bizarrely specific and odd that I think the movie's writers should be studied as lab experiment guinea pigs.

Well, they SAY it's Youtube, but really it's just a shitty looking website from 2002 because they didn't have money to use Youtube's likeness. Or maybe they did, but Youtube didn't want to be associated with this movie. In fact, I'm betting it's the latter.

It was around this point that both Michelle and myself began to think this was actually intended as a comedy, but I think that's just because the writers had no idea what they were doing. It comes off like one writer wanted to do a “serious” possession horror movie, but the other wanted to write a jokey horror comedy, so they instead combined into a two-headed, disagreeing chimera, a horrific abomination, and thus the movie was spawned.

At any rate, Michelle did think some of this was funny – so you might, too, ya never know. Your mileage may vary. There's a scene where they use a Ouija board and find out that the demon's name is Devon – that sounds like the name of a member of One Direction or something. This demon really got the short end of the stick when it came to badass demon names.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all this, a priest named Father Conway arrives to help them with the exorcism, and then the jock kid of the group, like a moron, hits him with the car and nearly kills him. They go back inside the building, and somehow get locked inside, because even though they're all corporeal humans and should be able to figure out doors, a ghost gets the better of them on locking a fucking door. Yeah, they're real brain trusts. Keep endearing us to them, movie!

This movie sure likes to abuse priests, which I think indicates a deep seated psychological trouble that the movie needs to see a therapist for.

Next we get a long, mushy trudge through soggy horror cliché. Every character basically acts the way you expect – there's a stoner guy in the movie who walks around the entire time in his underwear with two Cheetoes stuck to his back and the phrase 'I Love Fat Cock' drawn on his back in marker. That's so bad that I can't imagine who would write it and think it was funny.

Please stop showing this, movie. Please.

Oh, and you know what this was missing the whole time? Exposition. Looooooots more exposition! So the movie does right by itself, and adds in an over-long scene of the two leads finding convenient videotapes explaining that there was a patient named Devon (like the demon's name earlier! A-ha!) there at the hospital who got mistreated and that's why all of this is happening now, or some shit like that. I do have to say this answered some questions – but not the main one I had, which was: How are they using the Internet and watching things on TV? Who is paying the fucking electric bill in this place? Wasn't it deserted for like 20 years?

Maybe the GHOST paid the electric bills! OooooOOOOooohhh!

Then there's the random guy who comes in and threatens to call the cops on them for being there. The next second, he's sticking a gun in their faces and propositioning (what's supposed to be) a teenage girl for sex. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't like that. Isn't that like calling the cops on a guy for breaking into your house, only to immediately order the assassination of the burglar's entire family before the cops get there? Bit of a mixed message.

Anyway, he gets the typical death characters in these movies often have – the demon breaks his neck, then he walks outside with his head twisted 180 degrees backwards, and accidentally shoots himself in the face.

Ho hum. Booooooorrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnggggg.

Oh and there's a really random scene where the demon pretends to be the normal kid, Rory, again, only to fake them out and then immediately try to attack them again. It makes no sense because we never see the demon try to do this again. But hey, fuck logic! We have super cool possession effects to show!

As the movie slogs on, like a drunk rhino, most of the scenes take place in the middle of the day. Which is the worst idea, because now we can more clearly see how shitty and run down the building they're in looks. They somehow get the demon out of the kid again, for real this time, and then the hot blonde chick of the group who is near 30 but playing a high schooler gets it next. She's the obvious choice because the movie had her take off her bra in an earlier scene and now she's able to run around so her boobs jiggle a lot, and if anyone ever watched this, that would be an obvious pandering reason to do so. Oh, and I guess she kills a lot of people or something.

The next 40 minutes of the movie is basically just disposable – endless scenes of these morons wandering around in the dark with flashlights. The possessed girl kills the stoner guy and stabs the fat kid of the group in the gut, but he doesn't die yet. They all end up splitting up. Patrick and the lead girl find the possessed demon chick in an upstairs freezer room, but they kill her by stabbing her eyes out.

So this is basically the equivalent of a wet T-shirt mud fight between these girls. Glad the movie's not pandering!

You know what, this isn't even funny anymore. The least you could have done was add cartoon sound effects!

It turns out Father Conway is still alive, and actually killing some of the kids himself for no real reason. He even manages to kill the lead girl by sticking a lead pipe through her torso, which was training I never knew they gave priests in the sacristy. Eh, you learn new things every day.

Then Patrick shows up, cries over the fact that this girl he's known for six hours died, and burns Father Conway alive with a lighter. I do think every horror movie should end this way, so I guess that's a point in the movie's favor:

If there weren't already a bunch of heavy metal songs written about this, it might be more shocking.

After Father Conway kills the lead girl, it's revealed that the girl's name was Devon and she was the one sent to the asylum! And also the drug addict woman who shot herself in the opening scene was her mother! Shock and awe! What a twist! So Patrick goes from mourning over her to mutilating her with a fan blade, cutting her arms off and then shoving her into an incinerator in like, ten minutes. His mind is like Silly Putty; he never sticks to just one idea for long!

Also note the complete dead-eyed lack of empathy at the horrific violence he just committed. Maybe the movie is trying to make a point about how we're all so desensitized now. Or maybe it's just total shit, either way.

So that's Exeter. It sucks. It's poorly paced, poorly acted and poorly characterized, and the scares are as good as any you would find in your local Kindergarten class. The plot makes no sense, with a bunch of random threads never connected, like the world's worst-made Christmas sweater, coming unraveled at the seams. Like, yeah, a story about a random possessing demon with no rules or logic to how it works, and the magical priest who can survive being hit by a car and then becomes an stone badass killer for no reason. Sign me the fuck up for that.

But at least it's not a total loss. There are a few redeeming factors. Like, uh, well...actually, nevermind.

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