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.

Halloween (2007)

There was a time back in the mid ‘00s where, for some reason, movie studios felt the need to totally revamp the old horror classics that nobody ever had a problem with to begin with. But the studios really wanted to do updated versions, even though nobody was asking. And I get it - Hollywood has always lived on the backs of remakes. We have timeless stories and we make them new again for new generations. However, it really seems like Rob Zombie was trying to kill the story of Halloween with this remake rather than keep it going.

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Scout Taylor Compton, Sheri Moon Zombie, Malcolm McDowell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

This is an awful, repulsive piece of trash with nothing really good about it. It’s seriously just amazing how bad this really is. Zombie wasn’t bad at making pseudo-Texas Chainsaw rip offs like House of 1,000 Corpses, and The Devil’s Rejects was legit a great movie, but it was this movie where he showed his true colors - i.e. he can’t do anything else. But if you want screaming, cursing rednecks and lots of sleazy sex scenes, you’ll be in paradise here. And if you want that, I'll know to stay the fuck away from you.

The only question is, what does any of that have to do with John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween? Nothing. It has nothing to do with it.

We start off with something that doesn’t make sense from even the first line of dialogue: hillbilly rednecks living in the midwestern suburbs. Yup, the Myers family in this is apparently a bunch of constantly unpleasant jackasses, led by the stepfather Ronnie, this greasy looking motherfucker who looks like he belongs in a trailer in Alabama, but is instead in the suburbs in Illinois now. I guess Zombie really, really needed to put in guys who look like him! It’s like a security blanket or a pacifier for an infant.

Yup, this is how Halloween should open up, said no one ever.

In the first few minutes, Ronnie says he thinks his own stepdaughter's ass is hot and says Michael’s mom is jealous of her own daughter’s ass. That’s how we’re starting off this movie. A pair of adults talking about a teenage girl's ass. Ah, it’s refreshing to start off with absolutely zero expectations or integrity. How could you get any worse, movie? That was a rhetorical question. The movie gets way, way worse.

It’s fucking amazing how unpleasant this is to watch - like, really, even if you don’t care that it has nothing to do with Halloween, it’s still bad on every level. What’s entertaining about watching a bunch of white trash rednecks scream and break shit? I guess the point is to show how bad Michael’s home life is, but frankly all that’s missing here is the cops on speed dial for the next time there's a domestic incident in which one of the kids or the mom, uh, fell down the stairs. Yeah. That's it.

If you never pictured the hulking behemoth Michael Myers as a whiny, stringy-haired 10-year-old, well, now you're safe and will never be afraid of him again. Thanks for fucking nothing, movie.

Michael's mother is of course played by Sheri Moon Zombie, because the entire cast of every Rob Zombie production goes like this: 12 big hairy ugly dudes, and Sheri Moon Zombie wearing a bikini top most of the film. That sounds like the beginning to a terrible porno, which makes sense because Sheri's only role in every one of these films is to show off her tits and ass.

If it seems weird to you that Zombie constantly casts his own wife in these films just to let the whole world see her naked, well, I guess some marriages are just never meant to be understood.

And yeah, as most criticisms of this movie mention - it’s an origin story for Michael Myers, one of the most recognizable horror movie villains. Not to quell the creative ambitions of Rob Zombie (haha...hahahaha….ha ha HA…), but if we needed an origin story, we probably would have gotten one before this movie came out in 2007. The scary thing about Myers was that he was pure, unexplained, unstoppable evil. Explaining him and giving him an actual character is like shining a light under the bed and telling your kid there’s nothing there, it’s all in her imagination.

But seriously, even if you get past that, just think about it: if you were to give Michael Myers an origin story, and show it on screen, why the fuck would you want it to be this one? We don’t need scenes of him whining in the bathroom or being bullied at school. Why would we ever need that? Even if you wanted to know more about why he became a killer, these are very poorly written scenes where every person he meets is a total unrepentant, over the top dick to him. They’re all basically just excuses for Zombie to go for the shock factor of having people say fuck around little kids and show boobs. That’s not interesting to watch.

I want to see all my horror slasher icons as bratty children. That makes the REAL terror shine through...

But hey, he gets his revenge by killing a bully who was mean to him in the woods!

When they say fight back against your bullies, I’m pretty sure they just mean throw a punch back. Not ambush them in the woods and beat them to death with a stick. But it’s okay, because this is never mentioned again. Yes, really…

The whole movie so far has just been the equivalent of a really obnoxious guy screaming in your face. Every scene is full of greasy, grimy looking people swearing and talking about sex in the most annoying ways possible. But hey, at least we get to see the realism in how Michael finally snapped and became a killer! He’s sitting there eating candy in his house, and then, with no provocation, he gets up and starts slaughtering his whole family.

This is a ridiculous scene where it plays "Love Hurts" over top him sitting on the sidewalk by himself - just awful. It's baffling to me that anyone thought this would be touching. It's as emotional as watching a pet fish flushed down the toilet.

It was the fucking candy corn after all. Damn candy corn.

Yup, that’s it. That’s what Rob Zombie wanted to show you to account for a ‘realistic’ backstory! I mean, I guess it can happen in real life. But the way it’s shown here isn’t particularly realistic, subtle or well written - he’s sitting there eating candy, and then he goes and kills people. I guess he should have had an apple or rice or something. Maybe then he would have been fine.

And yeah, he kills his stepfather, his sister’s boyfriend AND his sister this time, as opposed to just his sister like in the original. That isn’t a big deal, but I just find it funny, like the movie is the bratty little brother of the original trying to outdo all his big brother’s stories. “You had one person killed, huh? Oh yeah, well I can have THREE people killed and in more bloody ways! And I’ll have child Michael wear the Michael Myers mask when doing his first kill!”

Nobody ever wanted to see a midget cosplaying Michael Myers, movie.

So then we get like forty minutes of him in a mental hospital with Dr. Loomis, who is played by Malcolm McDowell. He looks less like a doctor here and more like an aging rock star your dad would be friends with and your mom would disapprove of because he always sleeps on your couch blind drunk after a show down at the county fairgrounds on a Wednesday.

Hey, don't judge him. He's trying to clean up. He's just in a bad place right now.

These scenes all pretty much go like this: Michael asks to go home, Loomis tells him he can’t because he’s a terrible child, Michael cries. Rinse and repeat for like over 30 fucking minutes. Except for one scene that changes up the formula, where a janitor played by Danny Trejo of all people gives Michael a random pep talk about not letting the hospital get him down. I don’t even think Trejo was part of the cast. He was just walking by the set wearing a janitor costume for no reason, and delivered this speech unprompted.

"Remember, kid, don't let them get you down."
"Okay, Mr. Janitor. I don't know why you're telling me this, but okay."
"So why are you in here, kid?"
"I killed my whole family."
"Really? Oh, well forget what I said. You're fucked."

Oh, and this is apparently the worst hospital in the world, as they give metal forks to patients who have murdered people, and train their nurses to make rude comments that provoke the patients to murder them! Ha ha ha! Oh wait, I guess that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

The REAL origin story of the film is telling how mental hospitals learned to stop letting patients have metal forks.

After that, I guess they learned their lesson and kept him locked up for the rest of his life. But hey, what could have really been done about this? You know, things happen!

Until about 15 years later, when a couple of wretched security guards decide to rape some innocent girl who was brought in as a patient. They drag her into Michael’s room and do it there. It’s extremely unpleasant and grating to watch, as they scream “fuck” and “faggot” through the whole thing and obviously the rape itself is extremely awful to watch, and nothing I’d even want to subject my worst enemy to. There is no point to this scene. And it takes way too long. So, congrats on that one, Zombie, you can film a fucking awful rape scene. Hang that award on your wall.

Seriously, what am I supposed to get from this? I guess he really wanted to make Michael Myers the good guy, because I don’t think anyone in the audience is sad that these rapist assholes got murdered. Nothing about this scene or anything else so far has actually been scary so much as fucking gory and awful to look at - neither of those things are compliments. A gonorrhea infection is also awful to look at, for a comparison point. This does not make a good movie.

My only real conclusion has to be that Zombie wasn’t interested in making a horror movie, because this is not a horror movie. This is porn. It’s porn for people who like watching serial killer films and who get off on reading about Jeffrey Dahmer or some shit.

Sigh. So I guess Michael kills everyone else in the hospital, including Danny Trejo, and breaks out. After like, an hour and a half of all this unwatchable, unpleasant, unscary bullshit, what more is there to do? Regurgitate the original 1978 classic, of course!

Seeing this poster on a Google search while you have this remake on would be the only way you'd ever be reminded of the original while watching this piece of shit.

Yes, really - an hour and a half in, we get introduced to Laurie Strode finally. She’s played here by Scout Taylor-Compton, who doesn’t seem like a bad actress. But her first scene has her miming being molested by making over the top sex noises and playing with a bagel, and I died inside just typing that sentence.

You know, it doesn't matter if I even explain this scene more. It would still be stupid.

Her whole character doesn't even make sense. She's a girl next door type who makes jokes to her parents about child molestation! She's an outgoing peppy chick who gets inexplicably shy like a different person entirely when her best friend asks if she has a boyfriend! These things could be fine if written better, but in this movie, I think it's safe to say Zombie isn't in tune with how teenage girls act.

Well, that bagel-child-molestation thing would be bad no matter what. Seriously, what the fuck?

The whole thing just kind of plays out like a dumber, trashier version of the 1978 one, with several scenes just being shot for shot the same. It’s full of really shitty changes from the original. Like when this one girl and her boyfriend just finished having sex. In the original one, it’s just a dumb, harmless scene - they had sex and she tells him to get her a beer, and he gets killed by Michael. Here, though, she’s a total bitch to him and seemingly can’t stop being rude even for one second just because the sex was bad.

Christ, even her face is annoying to look at. I'm sure she's a nice person, but this character is just so bad in this movie.

I’m not saying that’s unrealistic - though the dialogue and writing suck - but it just points out what’s wrong with this. This wasn’t a change made for some great change to the overall story. It was just because Zombie seemed to want to make everything super gritty and "realistic," which mostly just comes off as dumb as fuck in this. It comes off silly, tired and dated. Making people shittier and ruder isn’t being realistic, it just shows what a small minded view you have of people.

The final chase scene is extremely boring and lame. It goes on for fucking ever. Like seriously I could have read a few chapters of Infinite Jest by the time this goddamn scene ends. The original movie’s chase scene wasn’t night and day from this one, but this movie has been completely unwatchable poison up to this point, so I guess it’s just hard to sit through more of its fat rolls of “plot.” There’s a moment at the end when you think it’s over - Laurie does her whole “was that the Bogeyman?” line, and Loomis replies. But then…

Yup! It’s still going. You hack ass piece of fucking shit. JUST STOP! Sorry for the tasteless profanity. I got possessed by the spirit of the movie there.

It finally ends, after like twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the Myers house in another stale attempt at a chase scene. The least this movie could have done was end sooner, but no, we don't even get that. We have to sit through Zombie's unique vision - a dull, dime-a-dozen chase scene that anyone could have filmed. Woo hoo... Anyway, Laurie finally kills Michael and THEN it's really over!

Wow, was that all? After two hours of rednecks screaming the word “faggot,” unnecessary violence, rape scenes and people being horrible to each other for no reason, I really want more. I think Rob Zombie really did capture what made the original a classic. I’m surprised he ended it at only two hours myself! I know I could have watched at least another two hours of this tasteless, irredeemable bullshit.

A lot of people talk about how this remake ruined the original’s point by explaining Michael Myers’ character, and they’re right. The original movie was only scary because of how mysterious Michael was, and how he was this unstoppable evil force who just descends randomly on a small town. It was the arbitrary, random nature of it that made it scary. Here, once Zombie explains it all, it’s just a bland serial killer upbringing story that has as much charm as reading a Wikipedia article on Ted Bundy.

But even if you don’t care about that, the movie is still complete shit. This is an annoying, irritating movie on every front. It’s visually grimy and grungy, annoying to listen to because every character constantly spews "fucks" and "faggots" every other line in awful redneck accents and even the violence and sex can't save it, as neither one of those things is even remotely enjoyable to look at here. The movie is not even remotely tense, scary or atmospheric. The writing is woefully slow-witted, blunt and dull, so they can’t even fall back on ideas in the script and claim the gratuitous sex and violence was an artistic decision. It feels more like a dumb 15 year old’s attempt at scaring his mom and little sister because they made him go to church.

This movie fucking sucks, and Rob Zombie fucking sucks. The Devil’s Rejects was a fluke. This is all he really has to offer.

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

Mr. Hush (2011)

Mr. Hush is a movie that doesn’t even feel real. This feels like what a space alien would produce if he saw a movie a hundred years ago in some kind of intergalactic museum long after humankind went extinct. And then he went back intending to try his hand at it, but he got lost and ended up wandering in a spatial void for dozens of years, losing his mind in the process. And then he got back to his own universe but was unable to cope with the reality of all that he had lost, being that everything he’d once known had now forgotten him. Eventually, years after descending into a drug and alcohol induced stupor, a tiny lightbulb sets off in his brain and by some miracle, he remembers the movie. While trying to make it, after months and months of blood, sweat and tears put into the project, he accidentally urinates all over it whilst on a boozing spree. The finished product gets shipped back in time and released by some con-artist movie studio as Mr. Hush.

What I’m trying to say is, this movie should come with an ‘abandon all hope all ye who enter here’ sign taped to the front of the DVD box.

Director: David Madison

Starring: Stephen Geoffreys, Brad Loree

IMDb

The movie starts off with some credits – or rather, a PowerPoint presentation displaying the credits of all the people involved in this whole mess. You know, just so you know who to blame. And the over-dramatic music seems to be under the impression this is a movie which deserves over-dramatic music.

We then get some cardboard cut-outs of human beings chatting in a kitchen. How rude of the director to trick these two porn actors into lowering themselves to appearing in this horror movie!

So I guess these two are parents of a little girl named Plot Device. Maybe that isn’t her name, but shut up, you’ll never actually watch this anyway. We get an agonizing over-five-minute scene of these people talking about their Halloween plans. The dad, Holland, says he has fond memories of his father starting Halloween early when he was a kid so he could dress Holland up in two costumes and hit all the houses twice.

This guy was Michael Myers once. As if that is some sort of pedigree...no offense man, I'm sure you're really nice and all, but that just means you can be silent and walk around angrily really well.

Uh, I’m not sure that’s a fond memory, dude. I hate to break it to you, but your dad was probably either robbing those houses or cheating on your mom with the housewives living in them. Your childhood was a lie.

We then get several way too long scenes of the family just being cutesy, doing things with absolutely no substance and wasting the audience’s time with acting and dialogue so bad, you could practically call this an interactive horror film. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s simple – most horror films have characters dying as a plot point. This one, however, makes YOU want to kill the characters, in incredibly violent ways, with how annoying they are. What an interesting, avant garde way to make a horror movie! YOU are the killer! What a fascinating moral grey area with which to look at ourselves through the mirror of film!

What an amazing camera angle ... I love scenes tilted to one side where you can't even fully see all the actors in the shot...

Oh, I’m sorry – am I drowning out the super important scenes of the husband and wife talking about who’s going to be invited to a Halloween party? Not only that, but a Halloween party we never see! Genius writing, I must say. Then we get another near ten minutes with nothing happening. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that … after all, we get a lot of really important scenes here. Like, talking about how good of a father Holland is. Or about what costumes Holland saw while taking his daughter trick or treating.

So if you were wondering if this was just a compilation of some family’s home videos – the acting levels and camera work certainly would forgive you for wondering that – we do finally get a plot dragging its fat ass through the door. Some creepy guy in a priest outfit comes to the door and asks if he can use their bathroom, saying theirs is the first house he’s seen for half a mile with its lights on – yeah, I really believe THAT, seeing as the movie already said it was Halloween night and these people live in a populated suburban area. Since I gathered that simply from my own powers of reason and deduction, and Holland believes the guy’s story despite that he ACTUALLY LIVES in this movie’s universe, I think it’s safe to say the air in his brain got cut off somehow when he was inside his mother.

I mean seriously. He just lets the guy in and points him to the bathroom, then sits back on the couch and does nothing. What an absolute waste of existence. But hey, maybe it will be okay. Maybe the guy won’t actually do anything at all … oh, wait:

I'd say 'I told you so,' but I have a feeling Holland was passed out drooling on the day they taught 'don't talk to strangers' in Kindergarten.

So, yeah, the wife gets killed and then the daughter gets kidnapped. Holland gives an agonized scream and it COULD have been a sad moment – but come on, if you’re this dumb, how are we really supposed to feel bad? Maybe if the acting was any good. But seriously. This whole thing is just a poorly made PSA for not letting strangers into your house. Oh, the killer sings the “hush little baby, don’t you cry” song? Why? To give the film a reason to be called Mr. Hush? Can’t these goddamn movies just have a killer without some kind of stupid gimmick that makes no sense? I mean there’s just no logic in it. It never has any kind of tie-in to the story. You might as well just have him wear a top hat, a clown nose and singing Happy Birthday. Why? Well, it makes as much sense as what the movie actually has in it.

We then get a bizarre sequence in which Holland goes to the dentist and finds out that there’s been a slight change of personnel:

Yeah, because God knows that’s the final straw! You can kill my wife, you can kidnap my daughter, but impersonating my DENTIST?!? That’s just too far. Oh well; it turns out to be a dream anyway. Which makes way for the best old-man costume I’ve ever seen:

I can believe he gets really worn out and haggard looking, but he doesn't look anything like he did in the opening scenes anymore. I mean at least try for a little realism...

Seriously. Benjamin Button, move over; we’ve got a new prize for old man makeup in films. Praise the Gods who let this effect come to be! Oh okay – it’s terrible in every sense of the word. How are you supposed to take this seriously, you ask? Well, it’s simple: lots and lots of alcohol.

So despite now looking like a reject from a drunk 90s bar rock band in rehab, Holland works at some shitty diner and gets shouted at by his boss. He lives in a tent with some fat homeless man, and mopes around all the time. Here’s another example of how haphazard the directing in this is: for like ten minutes, we have no idea what exactly happened after his wife was killed in the opening scene. Eventually he tells us he’s been looking for his missing daughter for ten years now. Yeah because you know, moping around and spending your time taking peoples’ shifts at a shitty diner will totally give you tons of time to search for your missing daughter. Brainpower! It's not just for the sane anymore.

Another one of the amazing camera angles this movie has to offer us. Truly lopsided shots with one actor badly out of focus despite being right there are where the money is at.

Then he gets invited over to this woman’s house who he works with. She has a daughter who acts as if she had a gun pointed to her head forcing her to do this. I mean there isn’t any other explanation for why she sounds so bored. The woman and Holland have some riveting first date conversation about how the woman’s husband died in the war overseas. Because that’s such great first date talk … “hey, let’s talk about my dead husband and emotional scars!” Well I gotta say, it’s no wonder this woman’s schedule is so full of dates with different men all the time!

Oh, wait. It isn’t? In fact it’s emptier than a Blockbuster store? Color me shocked! But hey, she did find the only guy in the universe willing to play “one up” with her as he tells her the story of how his wife was murdered and his daughter was kidnapped. It’s extra hilarious now because, for any sane woman, this would be a prime advertisement as to why she SHOULDN’T see him ever again! “Oh, he had a kid and wife and let some strange man into the house without even questioning it? Sounds trustworthy to me!” Also, nice job looking for your daughter again, dirtbag – truly sitting in this house flirting with some woman you barely know will help!

They even admit they barely know each other, and yet just a few minutes before, the daughter said the mom talks about Holland all the time. Writing is fun!

I’m nearly 1,500 words into this review now and I haven’t even gotten to the fucking plot of this thing yet. This isn’t a long movie, people! It’s 88 minutes!

I’ll just sum up a lot of the next ten or twenty minutes: just these assholes talking and talking about nothing. They have a seemingly endless dinner scene at the woman’s house that honestly makes me feel like I’m stuck in hell. I mean it; it’s agonizing sitting here listening to these fucking idiotic characters spewing dialogue that sounds like it came from the director’s ass. Is there even anything else in the movie? Or is it just an endless stream of fake-cheery dialogue that not even world class actors could make sound convincing? Talking about the characters’ music tastes and love of certain foods doesn’t count as meaningful dialogue!

Thank fuck the killer comes back in again. Holland sure didn’t learn from the last time he let a stranger into the house. It happens again and the same guy comes in and kills the woman! Geez, what bad luck! The daughter gets kidnapped again too. What a coincidence. And in case you were wondering, no; the “Hush little baby” song still isn’t scary. Try again.

Then Holland gets kidnapped by Mr. Hush and locked up in some dirty basement. Why? I’m pretty sure the movie doesn’t even have an idea. The next thing I know, I’m watching the Mr. Hush guy do some ridiculous song and dance about how he has this vendetta against Holland for an unknown reason. In case you were on the edge of your seat wondering, no. The acting has not improved. I know; I was shocked too.

He comes in, makes some vague threats and then leaves...blood curdling terror, really.

We also get introduced to this other character who will make you wish you were deaf, his voice is so annoying. I guess he’s supposed to be the Renfield to Mr. Hush’s Dracula. And if you thought Renfield was annoying in the original Dracula story … well, this character is more annoying. I’m actually fairly sure he was introduced just to punish the audience for some kind of invisible perceived crime. GET HIM OFF SCREEN.

Apparently 'that weird semi-retarded uncle who comes to your parties and hangs out in the corner by himself' is now a valid movie character for your horror film. This guy was in Fright Night like 20 years ago, but I don't really think that's something to be proud of at all...

They bring in the daughter of that woman Holland started seeing, and tie her up too. She still acts like she’s got a gun to her head forcing her to be in this – can’t you at least try, honey? Nobody’s going to make you put this on your resume. The two bad guys also bring in some other chick and chain her to a table. They’re about to cut her open with a chainsaw, when Mr. Hush pulls back and says “Just kidding! What kind of psycho do you think I am?”

Well gee. It’s great to know he has a sense of humor. And great to know he just keeps a chainsaw around for no reason other than to make that joke … why am I even bothering? There was no coherent thought process to this. We then see exactly what kind of psychos these two are, as they then hook an IV up to the unconscious girl and start sucking her blood that way. These guys are the laziest vampires ever. Why not just put it in plastic McDonalds cups and drink it with straws?

WE NEED BLOOD...and we have to tie people down on tables to get it now. Modern vampires are such pussies.

And yeah, I guess THAT’S what they really were this whole fucking time – vampires. I shit you not. Couldn’t have clued us in on that at a more dramatic time, huh? It had to be in this weird, vague manner? And next time, really sit down a second and think: is having your villains make “I Love Lucy” jokes really a good idea? If your answer isn’t “no,” please put down the cocaine and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It’s not good for your creative processes.

So get this – the daughter escapes from her binds by using the grease from the chainsaw to slide her hands out of the chains. Which could be possible, but, one – is the chainsaw really that greasy? Is it just like spilling shit all over the place, and close enough for her to get enough to slide out? Two, SHE DOES IT WAY TOO EASILY. It’s like instantaneous! Then she goes over and just snaps his binds like it’s nothing! These two should be starring alongside David Blaine! Modern-day Houdinis, I say!

Then the daughter escapes and runs down the block to the police station, which apparently is just right around the corner from Mr. Hush’s kidnap torture den. Maybe re-think your lair next time, geniuses. She screams a lot, and finally gets them to come with her. Finally, some kind of competence in this whole thing. Although the cameraman’s fumbling around with the camera makes the whole thing kind of come off like he just accidentally dropped the fucking camera and they were almost out of shooting time for the day so they just went with it. But I’ll take what I can get.

The small of her back truly is what we should be focusing on here...

Meanwhile back at the house, Holland comes across a teenage girl sitting in a room upstairs that he eventually figures out is HIS own daughter Amy, who was kidnapped all those years ago. What was Mr. Hush doing with her this whole time? Why didn’t he just kill her too? Never explained! She barely gets any lines in the movie. The movie doesn’t think she's important. Was Mr. Hush just trying to brainwash her as revenge on Holland? Well, apparently, but even THAT explanation is giving the film too much goddamn credit.

It’s pretty much just brushed over like it doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s ONLY the main motivation for our lead character! Who cares about that anyway? Just sweep it under the rug! Focus on more important things. Like blackface Fright Night here:

Heh heh heh – that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Who came up with that? It’s just so goofy! That makeup makes it completely impossible to take his whole backstory seriously either. So what, he killed Holland’s grandfather because the grandfather drove over a wooden stick which accidentally impaled Mr. Hush’s girlfriend and killed her? How does that even work? I dunno. What kind of a story is that, anyway? Apparently a good enough one to give more importance over than the actual dramatic (heh heh) conflict of the movie (the missing daughter story). Logic is overrated.

So then a fat black police officer comes in and shouts “Freeze, motherfucker!” It’s not as funny reading it, but watching this guy:

…pointing a gun and shouting “Freeze, motherfucker” at this guy:

…is just about the stupidest, yet most hilarious thing in the whole movie. Whoever came up with that one just redeemed a lot of the torture of the rest of this movie. Good job! So I guess Holland’s daughter stabs Mr. Hush through the heart and kills him. Then they move in with the other lady’s daughter and that fat homeless guy, making for one hell of a sitcom set-up.

Then cancelled after two episodes.

Then the doorbell rings and Holland and both girls let out a huge “NOOOOOOOO!” Because, you know, this movie did for doorbell ringing what Jaws did for sharks.

There’s also a post-credits scene, because the audience was just so blown away by the rest of this movie that we really needed more, right? Some dude walks around in the woods and reveals that he’s actually related to Holland. Which somehow means that Mr. Hush’s minion guy can find him instantly and kill him with a hammer to the face.

Oh go back to the convenience store.

And no, he couldn’t see that hammer coming even though the movie makes it look like the attack came from directly in front of him. I guess he’s got a rare kind of eye cancer that affects his line of sight … no, wait, he’s just a fucking idiot.

This movie was crazy. Pure batshit insanity all the way through. You really can’t even comprehend how bad this movie is until you see it for yourself. In its worst moments it is pure torture, without one redeeming factor – you sit there waiting for something competent to happen and nothing ever does. It’s almost not worth even bitching about since I am really almost positive this was just some kind of home video project that the director blackmailed a studio to actually get a real release out of. The acting, the camerawork, the story – nothing was done well!

But at the same time, there came a certain point when the badness of the entire affair broke through and made way for a wonderful sense of “so bad its good.” There are some pretty hilarious scenes here. A relieving sensation overtakes you as you realize this. And then you will know – that you have been totally lost to the movie. That’s when the men in white coats will come in and cart you away. That, my friends, is the power of Mr. Hush.

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