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.

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

Death Curse of Tartu (1966)

They say the past was a simpler time, free of all the modern hustle and bustle and stress. The 1960s, for example, was a much simpler time, as shown in the movie Death Curse of Tartu, which is an hour and a half long and only about 35 of those minutes actually have anything happening in it. Ahh the good old days. Actually, saying there's 35 minutes of something “happening” in this is pretty generous...

Director: William Grefé

Starring: Fred Pinero, Babette Sherrill

IMDb

Co-written with Clayton.

This is an insufferable film with as much charm as waiting in line at the DMV, only usually you get something done a lot faster at the DMV. It was made at the same time as Sting of Death, another bad old 60s movie I reviewed a few years back. But this one is actually worse, mostly because the dance scenes in this are way, way less good, which is the standard by which all 60s horror films were judged even back then.

This one starts off with something sure to sweep the audience off their feet – twenty fucking minutes of nothing but some dude just walking through the Everglades. There's barely any dialogue and we have no idea why we should care about him, but hey, the music is so super over the top and lavish pomp and fanfare that we don't need anything actually happening! The music alone is enough.

Row, row, row your boat...sorry, I got nothing. I should have just left this caption box blank. God dammit.

He gets killed off by a snake. The music is the same pompous soundtrack now as it was when he was just walking through the forest. I really don't think that's the greatest way to build tension. Indiana Jones wouldn't have been as good if they had high-flying soundtrack music blaring while he was talking to people in his office back at home. Not all food is better when you put a bunch of sprinkles and whipped cream on it. Am I getting through with these comparisons? Point is – lay off the music until something exciting is happening!

Unless that's a real snake, I just can't believe this performance.

Ha! There! I showed THIS 50-year-old film how much I can critique it! Now I will truly look really smart.

To the film's credit, they do lay off that music in favor of … something even more annoying. It's this bizarre sort of ritualistic drumming with some weird slow chanting every now and then. I guess they were trying to set a mood, but it's too repetitive and mostly I think it was intended to send viewers into a catatonic state so they wouldn't be bothered by how boring the rest of the movie is. Though I do like that they showed us how current Florida Governor Rick Scott was spawned... 

Behold, yes, the birth of evil.

At this point, the movie only has about an hour left of its runtime. I can just picture a group of lazy filmmakers high-fiving one another in the editing room. “Yeah! Economic storytelling!”

Then we're introduced to generic body count characters Nos. 2 through 6! They're all white and nerdy and have no real other personality traits, which is the perfect type of person to get lost and die in some foreign place. That's some good old fashioned xenophobia for you. Much better than the modern kind, at any rate.

So I guess the movie now becomes about these bungholes. One of the guys, the leader I suppose, is constantly talking just to hear his own lips flap. I can say that because they see a skull in the woods and get freaked out, and one of the girls says it's the legend of Tartu, who can turn into animals or something. The main dude says no, he doesn't believe in that, it's all just superstition!

We found a human skull on a stick in the woods where we're going to have our field trip! Let's just disregard this and act like nothing is wrong!

But then, a few scenes later, he says he's worried about it. Maybe in a movie with more character development, this could be considered a plot point. But I think it's because the writers were on drugs and forgot about the first scene due to the large amount of time spent walking around doing nothing between the two.

In the middle of all this, the other kids ask if they can go down to the river and party and he says they can, reluctantly, not really sure it's safe for them – but he lets them go. Then later, he tells his girlfriend he wanted them to go and told them to, so he could talk to her about the curse stuff. What? This guy changes his mind more than Two-Face from Batman. Get a grip. Think!

But it ain't like the other characters are any better. They're the kinds of people who like to have a dance party on top of some ancient burial ground in the middle of the Everglades. I don't know who taught these morons to dance. I know white people never had much rhythm, but this is ridiculous.

Oh yeah, block the fucking camera! That's great choreography!

Hmm... let's try to find some positives with this scene, as hard as that might be. Uh, at least they're keeping to the spirit of Sting of Death? But at least that one's dance scene was focusing on the girls' faces and asses. I don't know what the fuck the cameras were directed to do during this scene – focus on the girls' abdomens! That's sexy!

Then they get in the water and are immediately killed by a shark that shows up randomly, presumably being an incarnation of this Tartu they keep going on about. Leader guy shows up with his gun and starts shooting at the shark. I think it'd be funny if he accidentally shot the two friends in the water and missed the shark entirely. But that doesn't happen.

The greatest field trips are always the ones where you need to have a gun at the ready at all times...

After that, they decide things have gotten bad, and now they have to leave. But they can't all just go back the way they came, no – they have to send one dude out on his own to bring back help. Why? It's never really explained. That's just the way they want to do it, so they send off Johnny to go do it, saying he's perfect because he can take care of himself in the wild.

But before we can get to how he does, we have to sit through another loooooooong scene of him wandering around in the Everglades. Because, I guess the movie hadn't shown us enough of that yet.

Pretty sure this guy ate paint chips as a kid...

Then, Johnny – the guy who we were told was so good at surviving that he'd be totally fine out here – sits down against a tree and is killed instantly by a snake. He doesn't put up a fight and he isn't taken by surprise – he just sits down of his own volition and lets himself die. That's amazing, after the stuff we heard a few minutes earlier about how good he was at surviving. It's like hearing someone is really good at drawing, then you see that they can't stay inside the lines when coloring. The cognitive dissonance is complete.

This = good in the wild, can survive. Awesome.

The remaining characters all find this cave place with a tomb inside. But before they can get to that, one girl is scared by the cave and runs outside, where she is chased by an alligator for way, way longer than any alligator chase scene ever needed to go. I love how she runs like hell to get away from that dumb gator, only it's walking at a very slow pace. She really sucks at running.

Now we know where Michael and Jason learned this trick from - Tartu!

Seriously, how does she get up into a tree? What is going on?

Gotta love the end of the chase, too, where she succumbs to injuries from a bite on the arm and dies. Wow. The tragedy is just too much to bear.

Back in the cave, they get into a fight with this guy, who pops out of the tomb – I guess it's supposed to be Tartu himself, who has taken all film just to show his lazy ass on screen. Which I guess is pretty much the same way the movie treated its audience. I love how they just shoot first, ask questions later. Like, really, what if he was a benevolent spirit who could help them out? How the fuck do they know they need to fight him? And even so, they're fucking breaking into his tomb. What did they really expect him to do - invite them to watch TV and have pie?

"What are you douchebags doing in here? I'm trying to sleep. I have an important meeting in the morning."

So they just drown him in quicksand and that's the ending!

That look of mild irritation basically sums up the audience reaction to the film. Boom! Oh yeah. Nailed it again!

Overall this was an asinine film with pretty much no redeeming qualities. Everything about this story is bad. It's basically a story about some idiots who come into this place, disturb a grave, and then when the sleeping ghost is mad and starts killing them off, they kill it in return. And it's a happy ending. That's like if you broke into my house, I attacked you to try and keep you out, and you killed me, then you were the one who got praised as a hero. What a load.

Most of the film is made up of the characters wandering around doing nothing in the Everglades. Being filmed there on-site doesn't excuse how mind-numbingly boring this whole thing is. Propaganda videos from tree-hugging Everglades rights groups are more interesting. B-roll footage from National Geographic have more substance.

Sigh. So I guess this movie would never really make Florida a great place to make movies. Oh well. I'm sure something else would eventually put Florida on the map.

Maybe.

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

Cinema Freaks LIVE: Unfriended (2015)

Welcome to our first sloppy attempt at doing an audio review of Unfriended. You can listen above for me and Michelle and our friend Mercedes talking about this film, but I'll also talk about it a bit down here as well - you know, for you poor saps looking at this in a cubicle at work or some shit. There are definite spoilers in the video and in this review, so if you really want to see this, don't read or listen to this yet.

This movie is getting a shitload of attention for being a found footage horror movie set all on Skype. The basic story is as follows: cyberbullied girl kills herself, then comes back for revenge on all the kids who had a part in bullying her through making a video and telling her to kill herself, etc. Conveniently all of them are online and chatting on Skype exactly when she decides to enact this revenge.

The title and plot sound like an SNL skit more than a serious movie. Unfriended? Really? But the actual movie, in practice, isn't too bad or anything. I've certainly seen worse found footage films, and at least this one is putting a new, unique spin on things. The film IS set only on Skype and only in these characters' rooms - a lot of movies like this tend to stretch it and have characters using their webcams while walking outside, or in any random room they happen to be in, and that isn't really how we act in real life. Not most of us, anyway...

The acting is actually surprisingly good, and you can believe these people as shitty, petty, cat fighting high school cliques who keep stabbing one another in the back. They're not good characters for the most part, but they're believable for this story at least. You know, unless you wanted people who actually looked high school aged. These people were either held back several times in school and have now become bitter as a result of a perpetual loop of high school clique (which would explain a lot), or they're actors in their 30s. Pick your own answer.

Plotwise it's pretty basic; just an anti-bullying story and nothing else. It's not done with any particular subtlety. One of the main things that really irritated me about this was how silly all the reveals were that all these characters had done bad stuff to the dead girl. Like they kept denying it and shit and then the ghost would prod some more, they would scream and cry about how sorry they were, and then they would die. This happened over and over again, and we were supposed to be surprised when one of them had done something bad - but after a while it was just stale. Too many long scenes of the characters just screaming at each other and crying gets grating in general. My ears!

Overall it really is more of a funny movie than anything scary. A few of the deaths aren't bad, but really with this set up, over Skype and all, it's near impossible to make a death scene anything less than ridiculous. The movie has fun with the deaths though, and doesn't try to get too supernatural on you or anything. It's more worth seeing for the visual style than the story - the way the film uses the computer desktop and the mouse cursors and Skype text chatting to convey story and character is pretty interesting and well done. Even when the film itself can drag or get too irritating to listen to, the visual style was obviously well thought out and constructed.

If you already hate the premise and don't want to be impressed, well, you'll hate the movie. But if you're like us and actually want to see what the fuck they could possibly do with a Skype horror film, check it out, it's worth your time for at least that one viewing. All I gotta say is, I'm staying off Skype next time I decide to humiliate someone to the point of suicide.

The Nun (2005)

A horror movie about an undead ghost nun killing people. If that isn't the worst idea you've heard all month, I'm really quite afraid to ask what could possibly be less dignified, scary or interesting.

Director: Luis de la Madrid

Starring: Anita Briem, Manu Fallola

IMDb

This review is a personal thing for me. I rented this movie years and years ago and tried to watch it twice, failing both times to even make it halfway through. In the course of doing this I also ruined the rental DVD case the movie came in – by water, nonetheless; which is how the killer in the movie kills its victims, which makes this whole thing extra poetic. It was as if the movie was cursed, and I was the unwitting victim of that curse. Eventually, I gave up and decided never to touch its toxic exterior again.

Until now.

We start off with a bunch of girls at boarding school being taught by a nun who likes to shove paper in girls' mouths and turn into a horrific hell-demon in the middle of class. The second one is expected, but the shoving paper in their mouths is a bit much. Maybe someone ought to tell the head nun about this.

But it turns out that was just a dream. Next we get a party scene where a jackass with a camera talks to some people at a party about going to Spain for no reason other than to get killed by this movie's ludicrously over-thought and simultaneously under-written plot devices.

Why is he filming this? We clearly saw in the previous scene this guy had his own girlfriend he could've been spending time with, but I guess being a weirdo stalker is cool too.

Oh, did I spoil that last part? I'm so sorry. I just can't seem to get this review right. I just know you were all on the edge of your seat about whether or not they'd die in this horror movie.

So I guess tragedy strikes as main girl Eve's mom – the woman from the opening – has some serious plumbing problems as her sink is overflowing.

"I will find the Mushroom Kingdom down here if I flood my whole house doing it!"

Maybe she should reconsider using a plunger in the sink and instead just call the fucking plumber. But while she's doing that she should also call the exorcist – these are supernatural plumbing problems that mean a ghost nun is coming to kill her. 

"How are you taking me seeeerrrrriooooouuuuussssllllyyyyy?!?"

Man, if only she'd have just fixed the pipes when she had a chance, and then a watery nun-ghost wouldn't have been able to get in. That's really the #1 danger when it comes to pipes and plumbing.

Eve comes home and finds out that a clearly hungover cop tells her her mom committed suicide, even though Eve actually saw the nun ghost kill her and she slashed her throat, which isn't a very common way of doing that. But whatever. Investigation shmvestigation.

"Whatever...can I go back to drinking vodka in my car yet?"

At the funeral, Eve meets an older woman who says she knew Eve's mom from a long time ago at boarding school. She talks about what's going on a little bit, but later on I guess the ghost nun didn't like that, because she also gets plumbing problems, followed by a swift arm-decapitation by elevator. Well I dunno about you, but this was the kind of kill I expected when coming into this movie about a ghost nun.

What? It's not weird at all!

Eve and her friends go to Spain because why wouldn't you after a horrific death in your family that left you an orphan? It just seems the most logical. I also love how the friend is constantly so flippant about Eve's mom dying – she continually tells her to cheer up, wonders why she's acting kind of weird, etc. Jesus. With friends like this who even NEEDS a phantasmagorical watery ghost-nun killing off everyone you know? I mean they're kinda one in the same.

"I know your mom just died, but cheer up, we're on a vacation to Spain!" Also I just realized they don't even do anything there besides the plot of the movie. What was their plan? Go to Spain and just stare at the walls of their hotel room? Good thing Eve's mom died and gave them a mission, then.

Then we get a scene at the library where Eve is researching the old boarding school. Some doofy looking dude who says he's training to be a priest comes up and offers to translate it all for her. She says yes and then later on he meets them at some night club to give it back to her. They bond over the fact that he killed his last girlfriend by running her over with a car. Yes, really. I guess that's just what Eve is into. I don't even have to make jokes here – the movie itself is just one big punchline. How did anyone keep a straight face when working on this? I know I fucking couldn't.

I mean, when you really get down to it, this movie fails at even the most basic tenet of scary movies – setting an atmosphere in which to be scared later. It can't even get that right. Every kill scene starts off with the unsuspecting victim in the bathroom or kitchen when water starts filling up the sink, tub or whatever. When you really get down to it, as an adult, you aren't scared by this – you're just annoyed because in real life, you'd have to clean up all that overflowing, leaking water. How is the movie supposed to scare you when THAT'S the only reaction most of your audience will get out of it?

"Aw, dammit, now I have to clean all this up..."

They leave the club to go do their real passion, which of course is playing detective and finding dead bodies all over the place. They see the one lady's body and then immediately decide they can't call the cops, because there are still two more victims who don't know about the nun-ghost yet and they have to warn them. Uh, so how about calling the cops while you're going to warn the others? Nope, then we couldn't have a movie!

This whole 'not calling the cops' thing goes so far that Eve actually throws the other guy, Joel, out of the car for wanting to do so. Eve persuades Priest Boy that they shouldn't do it because 'she just wants to find our what happened to her mother.' So because you need to chase around some ridiculous story about an old boarding school, that woman's friends and family don't get to know what happened to her when she's lying dead on the floor of her own bathroom. You little asshole.

She also brings up the fact that they are a lot alike, as no one believes HER about the watery ghost-nun, just like no one believed HIM when he said he wasn't drinking when he killed his girlfriend. They really are like peas in a pod!

I also love the scene where Joel is just standing out there in the rain. “Wait! I forgot it was raining out here! Let me back in! No, I can't relent! I have to preserve my manhood and dignity! CURSE MY OWN IMPULSIVE DECISIONS!!!”

"Curse the heavens!"

They make it to the old boarding school and meet up with the other two stock characters who we haven't seen until now, so obviously they have a lot to contribute, by which I mean they only exist to shovel exposition in our faces like melting snow off a driveway in March. We learn that apparently back in their boarding school days, they came across the nun shooting a shower head up Eve's mom's vagina.

Never mind that this is a serious situation we could get her fired for; we need to re-enact I Know What You Did Last Summer!

As this is a horrific abusive situation, they accidentally kill her – you know, like you do.

Don't pretend you've never had a night end up this way...oh, wait, is it really only me and the girls in this movie? Weird.

They somehow haul her body outside without being noticed. Are they the only people in the entire fucking school? How did they not get caught? Then they dump her in the water outside.

"If she ever comes back to life as a ghost through our plumbing, we'll be ready...well, on second thought, that sounds really stupid."

Uh...wait a fuckin' second here. What happened next? How did no one notice she was dead? How did she never get found in that pool of water? Was it just a bottomless ocean made possible by the mystical powers of Christ to kill off his most odious of followers? Did the girls just get to go home when their teacher was missing the next day and never have to come back to Catholic school? “Oh, sorry girls, your teacher went missing mysteriously. I'm going to ignore the shifty-eyed, sweaty-faced looks you all have and just send you home. We won't be investigating the disappearance of that nun, either. Have a nice life forgetting all our dogmatic Catholic teachings!”

In the present day again, they go hunting through the old boarding house and find a bunch of paintings that they determine are actually the ways all their friends have been getting killed, because apparently nun ghosts really like to base their killings off of old paintings in boarding schools that no one can see.

And yeah, really; hands decapitated by an elevator sure was an easy thing for those classical psychic prophets to paint back in the day when elevators didn't exist. What a bunch of geniuses they must have been.

Also, to up the stupidity from “eating paint chips while smoking dirt-weed and watching Kim Kardashian videos” to “permanent cranial damage,” we also see that apparently the nun put up a portrait of how to kill her – a harpoon through the heart. I guess she forgot to take that one down in the incredibly rare occasion someone comes in there looking for clues on what's going on, huh?

One of the two women from the boarding school sees that her painting is being decapitated. So logically she locks herself in a room away from everyone else and then somehow, through an overly long sequence, gets her head lopped off by a broken glass door.

That looks like a baby with vampire teeth dressed up in grandma's old nun habit. What the hell am I even supposed to be watching?

We get some flashbacks which reveal Eve's mom had sex with a priest named Miguel, which is why that nun was trying to wash out her ovaries like your dad washing your car for you on Thanksgiving weekend home from college. Because you know how the Catholic Church feels about abortions. They love 'em!

Isn't this like being against gun control by eviscerating gun-control-proponents with a Bowie knife?

Then somehow they flood the place, apparently because that's the only way the nun can't kill them. Even though she apparently comes from water to kill people, having a whole room flooded apparently negates the entire thing and means she can't kill? Why not just go for complete abject randomness and say she can't kill people in rooms with three windows instead of two, or can't kill people on Tuesday nights while Glee reruns are on? Just stop even trying at all. We'll all be better for it.

They split up a bunch of times, which just seems to prove the characters have never watched a horror movie in their lives. If there was any logical reason for splitting up it'd be one thing, but no, really; they just leave one person behind when they go and do things for no reason but “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE IN RANDOM ROOMS FOR SCARES!”

A lot of other random, boring things happen, which lead up to the big twist of Eve being the real killer all along. Yes, apparently instead of the watery ghost-nun killing people, it was Eve being possessed by the nun. Which really doesn't make sense, because of...well, the entire fucking movie before this. Why try to shoehorn in a twist? Did you lose a bet? Did the previous writer die in a plane crash and so the director replaced him with an M. Night Shyamalan devotee?

Actually, really, even a Shyamalan twist would be better than this. At least his are entertaining in that you have no idea what the fuck he was thinking. This is just the kind of “the main character was the killer all along, ooooooh!” crap that you'd get in a Freshman writing class.

There was no logic here – from the idiotic plot to the acting, which was made up of a bunch of exaggerated Spanish accents and all the actors seeming like they were confused at all times. Which doesn't surprise me at all given this movie's abysmal script-writing. All in all, I learned from this movie that plumbing is serious business, and if you don't fix your bathroom or sink pipes, a vengeful ghost of someone you killed will come back and kill your mom's friends. Yeah, that about sums it up.

I also am grateful to finally be able to finally put to rest my curiosities about The Nun, which I started many years ago and never finished. Now I'm kinda just wondering, honestly, why I bothered renting this in the first place all those years ago. Was I just a serious masochist back then? I guess that would explain how I turned out the way I am today; watching these movies and so desensitized nothing in them even remotely surprises me anymore. Such is life.

Eh, whatever. This sums up my opinion on the movie:



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