When it came to selecting which Christmas themed horror movies I was going to review, Santa’s Slay wasn’t even close to being a contender. It looked dumb, didn’t have good reviews, and although I did enjoy the punny title, it just looked like it was going to be awful. The reason I ended up watching it was because it was available On Demand and it was only 75 minutes. That’s a fantastic length for a movie like this! Normally, it takes about 45 minutes to realize how awful a movie is, and once you’re that far into it, it’s got a sitcom’s length left to go! You’d be an idiot for bailing on it at the end, and this Wolfman ain’t no idiot. Well, he’s an idiot for not realizing that “ain’t” isn’t a word, but other than that, he’s not too dumb. Oh, he’s also an idiot for referring to himself in the third person. Whoops!

“For British eyes onlyyyyyyyyy”

A long time ago, there Satan gave birth to a demon. I don’t understand how that’s possible, because I thought Satan was a man, but I guess that’s not the point. Santa was the name given to this demon, and he was a real dickhead. In 1005AD, an angel challenged Santa to a curling match, and if Santa lost, he would have to deliver presents on Christmas for the next thousand years. The angel did win, but since this movie was filmed in 2005, those thousand years are up, so Santa is free to be a dickhead once again. Santa (played by Bill Goldberg) is running around a small town killing everyone in Christmas themed ways. It turns out that the angel who defeated Santa in the curling match is living in this small town, so they face off in another curling match, and…ugh, whatever. Christmas Day ends and Santa loses his powers so people with guns shoot Santa down, only to realize they shot down someone who he had taken captive and Santa is still on the loose, ready to kill people again next year…probably?

We’ve all wanted to kick Chris Kattan in the chest at some point, right?

Obviously the plot of this movie is incredibly weak and even at only 75 minutes, they clearly ran out of story to tell. Despite the lack of plot, I can get behind any sort of transformation of a well-known legend into something more sinister and just running with it. Rather than doing something really interesting and creative, like was done with Rare Exports, this film just cashed in on the cheap jokes to be made. Even though there were quite a few deaths in the movie, I’m not exactly sure how I feel about calling it a “horror” film, because the emphasis was definitely on comedy. Remember how I said that Jack Frost was bad, but it had enough puns to keep you entertained? I’d say the same thing about Santa’s Slay, because there were enough puns and visual gags to distract you from realizing how shitty this movie was. The story was kind of dumb, it wasn’t scary, and it had some groan-inducing puns, but believe it or not, the movie had a good enough cast to pull things off. Bill Goldberg gained fame being a wrestler, so he was relatively charismatic as a super buff Santa Clause. It was funny to see Emilie De Ravin as one of the leads, because this was only her second movie (after Brick) so obviously she was willing to do anything. The opening sequence, which featured Santa ruining Christmas dinner, was a veritable who’s who of recognizable faces from the late 90′s, with “stars” such as Chris Kattan, Fran Drescher, Rebecca Gayheart, and even James Caan. This movie just goes to show that even with a dumb plot and poor effects, having a decent enough cast can make a dumb joke carry for 75 minutes. Oh yeah, and instead of having reindeer, Santa just had a giant “hell-deer”, which was some gnarly buffalo or something. Now THAT was kind of cool. Everything else? Not really cool at all.

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Do I call it Christmas Evil or do I call it You Better Watch Out or do I call it Terror in Toyland? Stupid fucking Troma movies and their goddamned titles! When gathering Christmas horror movies to watch, I was going more for an all inclusive type of thing instead of a “just the good ones” thing. How the hell was I supposed to know whether this movie was good or not? I watched this movie at the airport and I am lucky I did, because I had NOTHING else to do to occupy my time. I tried watching it at home, when I could have been doing other things, and I got pretty bored and, well, did other things. However, stuck between a Cinnabon and a Manchu Wok for two hours was the perfect environment to tolerate watching this movie, and since it’s Christmas Eve, what better time to review a movie whose title is a play on the phrase?!  OH MAN THAT’S AMAZING.

Just by posting this image, I think I’m about to go insane and will go on a murderous rampage.

A group of little kids are spying on Santa, who’s actually just their dad in a costume (spoiler alert), leaving presents and shit under the tree. When their mom comes down stairs, Santa starts getting horny and starts with the booby-honking. The kids see this, and one kid gets so freaked out by this that he runs upstairs and cuts his hand with a shard of glass. When this kid grows up, he works in a toy factory and spies on neighborhood children and takes notes on who he thinks is naughty and who he thinks is nice. It’s not just kids on the chopping block, but he starts judging his coworkers as well. Apparently this dude thinks he is the true Santa Claus, so he breaks into families houses to leave them dirt as presents and smashes their good toys. This “true” Santa also steals toys from the toy factory and donates them to a local orphanage/hospital/place where kids are, but then punishes some coworkers leaving church by killing them. This is when a mob of people starting trying to track down this Santa to, I don’t know, take him to jail or something? Anyways, this true Santa goes to his brother’s house and his brother tells him to stop acting like a dickhead and chokes him but then the angry mob shows up and true Santa ends up flying into the sky in his van. OH, OKAY.

How can this little dinky axe hurt anybody?!

I thought that maybe I had missed a crucial scene when ordering a few gallons of icing from Cinnabon that might have explained why this guy went crazy, and upon some further investigation, nope! I didn’t miss anything. This means that the only thing that made this guy bonkers was seeing Santa honking his mom’s boobs. THAT’S IT. With a movie like Silent Night, Deadly Night, you had a movie showing multiple sequences of why this guy fucking hated Christmas, and it wasn’t until 45 minutes in that he had actually snapped, but by then, you had understood all the crazy things that had happened to him. With Christmas Evil, all we saw was boob grabbing, and BOOM! Little kid is nuts. I’m not saying we needed to have as many events as there were in Silent Night, Deadly Night, but since it was a Troma film, everything was done with a pretty low budget, so it didn’t feel like there was a good enough cast/direction/everything to carry out the slower burning tension. I think that if this script was in the right hands and there was a enough of a budget to it, it could have been something more like Maniac, showing the damaged psyche of an adult who had a traumatic experience as a kid, but with Troma, we didn’t really get it. Oh well, we can always just rename it and try releasing it again!

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Even though I only just saw Silent Night, Deadly Night a few weeks ago, I was pretty excited to see that Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 had a theatrical screening in Chicago. I had read a few people online saying that this movie was better than the original, and I also knew there was some sort of scene in this movie involving garbage day and one character informing other characters that it was garbage day by saying something along the lines of, “It’s garbage day.” Other than that, there was really nothing that  I knew about this movie, but I still made sure to try to push it on people that they go see it. Why am I telling you this? I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE. I actually had to ask my supervisors if I could get out of work early so I could make it in time to watch this movie, and when I got into the theater, there were 11 of us. THAT SUCKS MAN!

Ricky acts like a real HEADcase in this movie! Hahahahaha! It’s funny, because he ends up chopping this lady’s head off.

Rather than recount the events of the first movie, you can just read the review here. Also, if you want to know what happens in the first movie, you can just watch THIS movie, because the first 45 fucking minutes are just flashback sequences of what happened in the first one. Seriously! The original killer’s younger brother is telling a psychiatrist about his childhood or whatever, and this movie just uses the footage from the original movie to touch upon all the major points. Once they retell everything from the first movie, we learn that the little brother Ricky (Eric Freeman) seems to be following in his brother’s footsteps. Shortly after the events of the first movie, Ricky got adopted, but still had psychological trauma similar to his older brother. Instead of specifically Santa Claus or Christmas, it was just stuff that was red. Cars, shirts, ribbons in a little girl’s hair, all of it made him go crazy. Things really get out of hand when Ricky’s girlfriend is confronted by her ex-boyfriend (who has a red car) and Ricky attaches jumper cables to his head. Ricky goes on a rampage through the neighborhood and kills people, including the infamous shooting of a guy taking out the garbage and Ricky saying, “It’s garbage day!” I think this rampage continues until Ricky puts on a Santa suit and sets out to find the nun whom he blames for everything that happened to his older brother Billy. Despite finding (and killing) the nun, Ricky gets gunned down in the process. Luckily, his eyes open at the last minute to let us know that he has survived! I wonder if there will be three more sequels?!

“IT’S CRIBBAGE DAY!” Hahahahahaha, guys, I’m killing it right now.

Did you know that this movie only took 10 days to film? Pretty incredible to think that an entire movie could be put together in 10 days! It’s a whole 88 minutes, so these people must have been incredibly dedicated to be able to churn out a movie that long in just 10 days! Well, remember how I said almost the entire first half of the movie was flashbacks? That’s one way that they were able to shoot this movie so quickly, because they only really had to shoot half of the movie. Another reason is that, even though the running time is 88 minutes, a pretty big chunk of that includes the SLOWEST credit roll in the world. In fact, there was SO much footage used from the original movie, the filmmakers decided to include ALL of the credits from the first movie in this movie too, to make sure those credits stretched for as long as fucking possible. I don’t like to do this, but this movie gets two ratings. If you’ve never seen the original movie before, or if it’s been a long time since you’ve seen it, then this movie is a lot of fun. It hits all the major points of the first one, and as you might remember, I enjoyed the first one, and on top of that, you get some extra cheesy, goofy horror stuff. However, if you’re like me, and JUST watched the original movie, the first half of the movie is really boring. I had a hard time staying awake, and it wasn’t until there was new content that I actually woke up and was paying attention, and once I was finally interested, the stuff I hadn’t seen before only lasted 30-40 minutes. In other words, if you haven’t seen the original, skip it and go right to this one, but if you have seen the original, just get this on DVD so you can skip to the middle.

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It’s a zombie movie, but it’s a comedy! Some might say that A Little Bit Zombie is a zomb-edy! Guys, do you get it? They took a classic horror movie monster and decided to give it a clever little twist to poke fun at it! Are you still with me? On the one hand, it’s kind of sad how frequently there are comedies made that use zombies as a punchline instead of any other type of horror movie monster. Then again, if people weren’t making comedies with zombies, we wouldn’t get things like Shaun of the Dead and we’d get more things like Stan Helsing. Either way, it just seems like no one takes zombies seriously anymore. I’ve seen a few terrible zombie comedies (Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!) before that are offensive to both zombies and comedy, but I’ve seen some (Zombie Honeymoon) take things in a slightly different direction and they can end up being somewhat entertaining. Turns out that A Little Bit Zombie wasn’t really either of those, but, then again, it did have Stephen McHattie, so it had THAT going for it.

For a guy named “Stephen McHattie”, he’s definitely wearing like, ZERO hats.

A couple of badass zombie hunters (Stephen McHattie and Emilie Ullerup) are using some orb thing to attract zombies to be executed in the middle of the woods. The problem is that a mosquito sucks some zombie blood and turns into a zombie insect! Almost like what happens in the beginning of Zombie 3, but not with birds. No, that’s not the one with the subtitle of “Killing Birds”, but–SHUT UP I’M GETTING SIDETRACKED. This mosquito splatters onto the windshield of a car taking a couple who are planning their wedding (Kristopher Turner and Crystal Lowe) to a cabin along with his sister (Kristen Hager) and her husband (Shawn Roberts). Obviously a zombie mosquito can’t be killed so quickly and soon the happy husband-to-be is showing signs of being a zombie. Whether it be detecting the heartbeat of things nearby or uncontrollable drooling at the mention of the word “brains”, he is trying to keep things quiet from his controlling fiancé. This only works for so long, but luckily this fiancé, along with his sister, are willing to seduce a victim whose brains he can eat. Unfortunately, his sister’s husband tries to help by contacting the zombie hunters to take care of the situation. Stephen McHattie says there’s only one way to handle this situation, but his partner, upset with the destruction of her mysterious orb, tries to offer a different solution, while his fiancé his a plan of her own. What happens? Well, if you’ve read this far, it’s worth spending 90 minutes to find out, at least while it’s on Netflix Instant.

It wouldn’t bleed so much if you could just keep your finger out of there!

Okay guys, I’m not here to try to defend this movie or anything, which should be obvious as you might have already noticed it is categorized as a “bad” movie, but there were still a couple of things worth pointing out. The scenes where the main character involuntarily drools all over himself were some pretty funny bits of physical comedy. We’ve seen other incarnations of this lust for brains, but I’ve never seen it handled in such a goofy way, which was entertaining to see. In addition to that, the last scene in the movie also has a couple funny bits of physical comedy, but were I to give them away now, they’d be completely ruined and there’s no way you’d find them funny. Central to that scene would be McHattie, which brings me to another point; how awesome is Stephen McHattie!? I hadn’t really made note of him until I saw Pontypool, but every time I see him involved in any movie in any capacity, I get pretty excited. To see him taking on a role that could have easily been filled by any other typical genre actor but giving it is own brand of McHattie-ness was great to see. In fact, I’d say that the whole cast and their portrayal of characters that slightly broke traditional genre molds is what made this movie worth sitting through. We saw a relatively “wimpy” leading man who was blinded by the love of his controlling (without being obnoxious) wife, while also getting advice from his muscle-head best friend who explains his sister was the closest he could get to actually marrying his friend. Maybe it was because I had set my standards so low once I realized it was a horror comedy that I was surprised that this movie didn’t really use gratuitous nudity or violence to entice viewers that it felt it had its own sort of charm to it, but it’s not something I could ever see myself watching again. Or at least, not something I’d watch on purpose.

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Have any of you guys ever played with a Ouija board? Has anything evil ever happened to any of you? Exactly, I didn’t think so. I feel like everyone has a story about some made up bullshit that one time happened to one person they knew who fucked around with a Ouija board. I remember a time where my friends and I played with a Ouija board basically every night for two weeks and NOTHING ever happened. We played in basements and in attics and even played with it in a really old movie theater and nothing spooky happened. Where were all the demons to come out and fuck with us? Although, we one time used it with this guy who was (possibly still is) a dickhead and he was super angry that the girl he had a crush on thought my jokes were funnier than his were and the ghost told him to suck its ghost ass. I WASN’T EVEN TOUCHING THE GAME, I SWEAR IT. And it was all “suck my ass”. Where was I going with this…oh yeah! In one scene of this movie, the characters play with a Ouija board. That’s it, that’s the only connection to anything I’ve been saying. Glad I could help!

Same thing happened when I tried to trim MY pubes.

In the late 1970′s, a little girl freaks out and kills her parents with scissors. 12 years later, we see this girl, who has been nicknamed “Mary Hatchet”, in a mental institution getting raped by a guard. 9 months later, we see Mary giving birth to this lovechild, but the doctors let her know the baby didn’t survive. This makes Mary freak out again and murder basically everyone in the institution before the cops show up to murder her. 20 years after THAT happens…wait, so it’s…uhhh….32 years and 9 months after the opening scene, and in those 32 years, the legend of what Mary did turns into a night full of mischief and mayhem in the small town where it happened. By “mischief and mayhem”, I mostly mean high school kids throwing eggs and things, getting drunk, and wearing masks of Mary Hatchet. At one party, a girl brings a friend that nobody has met before, played by Danielle Harris. Strangely, people at this party start getting murdered! Weird! The kids at the party go to Graveyard Gus (played by Bill Moseley) for advice on how to not get murdered. When they gang goes to the abandoned mental institution where Gus used to work and Mary used to live, he finds records showing that her baby wasn’t actually dead! In fact, the baby is alive! And would you believe the mysterious friend at the party is Mary’s daughter and she’s killing everyone there for no real reason!? Well, not NO reason at all, but earlier in the film we had learned that Mary had some sort of “menstrual rage” or something, and I guess once a month she would become completely insane. I guess that’s why Mary freaked out in the opening? She was getting her first period? This trait was passed down to Danielle Harris and that’s why she started killing everyone. Her character kills a few more people, Mary’s ghost shows up and somehow kills people, and then the movie’s over. Yay for getting periods! Wait, no, boo for getting periods that make you kill people!

“I know she’s holding the severed head of someone she just murdered and everything but HOLY COW! BOOBS!”

One of the stranger things about horror movies is that it seems to have almost a completely different set of standards for what’s entertaining when compared to other films. Because there are so many awful horror movies, you can acknowledge how awful the genre typically is, while also being awful on its own, but still be okay? Did that make ANY sense? Probably not. Let’s try to unravel this complicated yarn of nonsense that I appear to be weaving. This movie is not good. That’s the short review. However, the movie seemed to be aware of the fact that it had a very low budget and a pretty ridiculous concept, so by embracing the poor quality of the film as a whole, it seemed to be self-reflexive of the entire genre. Have you guys seen Dead Snow? Or have you maybe seen Piranha 3D? Okay, those movies aren’t actually scary movies, but they fit in the horror film genre. Because they’re aware of the ridiculousness, they embrace it, and end up being really entertaining movies.  I’d  say that Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet fits into that category of horror film, as it seems to intentionally attempt to make you laugh. Even though I use Dead Snow and Piranha 3D as references, this movie is nowhere near as good as though films are. Need I remind you that the plot was kind of dumb, despite making just enough sense for me to realize what the plot was, but all of the characters were still pretty annoying and had poor dialogue. There were decent enough kills and special effects, there was a bunch of arbitrary sex/nudity, and threw in two actors who are genre staples, and the movie is far from unwatchable. If you were to remove any of those factors, especially the entertaining Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris, and this movie would be absolutely terrible, but by hitting all those points and including the comedic elements of mocking itself, it was at least somewhat entertaining. Also, seeing Bill Moseley as a crazy old man reminds me of how fucking terrifying he was in The Devil’s Rejects. Man, that guy had one crazy beard.

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SCIENCE! Name one good thing that science has done for you lately. I dare you. No, I’m not talking about getting a text message or the invention of gravity or anything, but name ONE way in which has helped you personally. Couldn’t think of anything? Didn’t think so! You know what else is played out? MATH! NOBODY LIKES MATH! Only nerd losers like math or science. Yeah sure, pictures of outer space are pretty cool I guess, but it’s not like I’m ever going to see that shit in person. It’s like, “Hey, check out this picture of a totally hot babe that you’re never going to see in real life!” and I’ll be like, “Say whaat? DAMN!” What the fuck was I talking about? OH YEAH! Science! Remember when we were kids and we thought we’d have flying cars and jetpacks?! WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?!  No but seriously, a friend of mine and I were the only two people to attend a talk by James Kakalios, author of The Physics of Superheroes and he pointed out that even though the mechanical aspect of science hasn’t  grown as exponentially as people thought it was, the science of information has grown in its place. I can’t really remember what that means as I type it out, but think about the internet and how much information we all have on each other and how accessible that shit is to everybody…crazy, right? Nobody thought we’d learn that much about each other or the solar system or the human body! So take THAT, science! What’s this movie about again? Oh yeah, weirdo scientists.

Like, what the fuck is this thing? A rabbit? A butterfly? A Mouser?

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are two genetic scientists on the verge of a breakthrough. They’ve genetically engineered two brand new life forms, but that’s only where their plans start. They know that the must move on to human trials, but when their financial backers frown at this, they move ahead in secret by using one of Elsa’s eggs. To their surprise, the shit actually works and a baby  is born. They never really quite explain what the creature is made up of, other than it’s part human but also has a tail and wings and amphibious lungs. How do they know about the lungs? Well when Clive realizes what they’re doing is wrong, he tries to drown it, only to see it start breathing. AWKWARD. As their creation is developing more and more quickly, getting smarter and smarter, Clive and Elsa realize they need to relocate it from their lab and to a barn owned by Elsa’s family. Despite Clive wanting to kill their freak, Elsa says that because it’s maturing so quickly, it will soon be dead anyway. Clive’s okay with that, but when there’s a big press conference about the first two creatures they made earlier in the film, everyone sees these things kill each other because the female accidentally turned into a male while they were focusing on the monster in the barn. Elsa sees how dangerous the creature is and does some surgery on it to remove a stinger it had grown, but when Clive sees its vulnerability, he decides to have sex with it. COME ON, CLIVE! THAT’S A BAD IDEA! Both Clive and Elsa realize the danger they’re in by keeping this thing alive, but when they go to kill it, they find that it’s died. After burying it, other scientists show up to find out what the fuck is going on, only to realize the thing isn’t dead, but is just as dangerous as ever. Demonstrating the traits that the other creatures did, this thing has turned into a male and decides to fuck Elsa and kill Clive. After Clive’s death, we see Elsa having a meeting with the financial backers and see that they’re offering her money. When Elsa stands up, we see that she was impregnated by the weird thing and she’s getting money to deliver the babies! Cool!

I guess I can see being attracted to that thing. It could always use that tail to do butt stuff, right? I mean, if you were into that thing or whatever…heh heh…I’VE MADE A HUGE MISTAKE.

The problem that I have with the ending is that YOU KNEW THAT SHIT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN RIGHT FROM THE FUCKING BEGINNING! I don’t know, maybe I’m just super smart, but just knowing a little bit about the plot I knew that the creature, who was nicknamed “Dren”, was going to be killed but not before getting something pregnant or leave eggs somewhere or something like that. Dammit, I’m so mad! IT WAS SO FUCKING OBVIOUS!!!!!!! Ugh, anyways, this movie wasn’t really my jam.The reviews that I got from other people were pretty divisive, with some people absolutely hating it and others absolutely loving it. I fall into the former category, as this really just wasn’t for me. I don’t think the whole “mad scientist” approach towards horror films have ever really been my thing, even including things like Frankenstein. I don’t really know why either, maybe just because I know that shit would NEVER happen. I’m not saying that all other horror movies are enjoyable because of the possibility of them happening, but they lean too far towards the science fiction end of the spectrum that none of them really get me that excited. They all have that B Movie feel to them, but it was cool to see this weird as shit movie get a theatrical release. If anything, it stood out amongst all other generic horror movies released theatrically, and I will say that seeing Dren made me feel weird and uncomfortable, so they at least succeeded in that respect. However, I would like to remind everyone that ADRIEN BRODY FUCKS A MONSTER WOMAN THAT HE CREATED IN A LAB. Again, I’m not saying I need realism in my horror movies, but to think that anyone would ever walk into a room, see their husband fucking a monster, walk out, and then be willing to put that aside is such a fucking crazy leap in the logic for me to even give a shit about anything else that happened in the movie. I’m not going to give anyone shit for being into this movie, but I certainly never need to see it again.

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Not including remakes or sequels, there are three big problems that cause horror movie fans to preemptively judge a film by. One of those things would be horror movies that get a wide theatrical release because these are typically movies that are “safe” and are really just trying to make a profit. They just throw together some “hot” stars and hope that their target audience (teenagers) can be interested enough to spend some money on. Another problem horror fans have is when a movie is PG-13, because most people assume that there won’t even be scary enough imagery to warrant a stronger rating. I can see where people are coming from with that argument, but rather than pointing out exceptions to that rule, I’ll just go along with it. Yet another bit of information that can make someone hesitant about the quality of a horror film is to find out that it had been made years prior and the studios were just waiting until the perfect moment to dump it on people as to have no competition. In the case of House at the End of the Street, I think even fair-weather horror fans knew what they were in for with this PG-13 rated movie made a few years ago that was taking advantage of Jennifer Lawrence‘s popularity to get a wide release. I’m probably alone on this, but despite all of those things it had stacked against it, I found a few things enjoyable about this otherwise forgettable film.

And we’re supposed to believe that HE is the creepy one!?

A little girl attacks her parents with a hammer, killing them both. Four years later, Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) moves into a new house which is the second house from the end of the street. The one at the very end? Why, that’s the one where this double murder was committed! Despite the dead parents and little girl never being heard from again, the son of the family, Ryan (Max Thieriot), still lives there by himself. Despite warnings from all the other neighbors, Elissa befriends Ryan, but when we see Ryan caring for a woman tied up in his basement who he calls by his “dead” sister’s name, we know something wacky is going on. A few times this girl tries to escape, only to be apprehended by Ryan and tied back up. With their romance getting sexy, Ryan admits to Elissa that before his sister murdered their parents, he was swinging with her on a swing set and he accidentally pulled her off the swing, causing brain damage. He feels like he’s the one to blame for everything, which is why the audience almost sympathizes with him not telling anyone about his sister being tied up. After Ryan is attacked by some neighborhood kids, Elissa goes to the house to find him, which is when she finds the girl locked in the basement, along with an empty container of colored contact lenses. What we learn is that the girl tied up isn’t really Ryan’s sister, but rather just a girl unfortunate enough to get too close to Ryan, and she’s just there to fill the void of his sister who he reveals actually died during the swing set incident. Elissa is able to free herself, with help from her mom, and Ryan is left alive, but badly wounded after the whole ordeal. While Elissa and her mom are moving out of the house, we see Ryan in a mental institution, and then see some of his flashbacks. As it turns out, with his parents being drug addicts, when his sister died, his parents made him grow his hair long and started to refer to him by his sister’s name, and the night that he killed his parents was the night he couldn’t take it anymore. You drug addicts and your obsession with putting dresses on boys, will you never learn?!

I’d like to give HER a “winter’s bone”, if ya know what I mean! I think that meant I’d give her a boner. Whoops. Well, not like I can delete that joke.

Let me be clear: I don’t think this movie was good and I didn’t think that anything that happened in it was scary. I can see exactly why this movie was shelved for a few years, because nobody would have cared to see it if it wasn’t for Jennifer Lawrence’s popularity. That being said, I found that the story played out in a more creative way than most other widely released horror movies, regardless of what the rating is. In addition to the lengths that Ryan was willing to go to in order to keep his secrets safe, the town sheriff (Gil Bellows) was doing drugs with Ryan’s parents at the time of his sister’s accident, so he has been lying to make sure that both he and Ryan are safe. One thing that didn’t click with me until just now was that the movie kept saying Ryan was living with his aunt at the time of the murders and that he only came back once his parents were murdered. I couldn’t really figure out the continuity of the story and how Ryan could both be at his aunt’s and at home to murder his parents, but then I remembered it was the sheriff who gave that information to protect himself. NOW IT’S ALL MAKING SENSE! A lot of widely released horror movies of recent memory, especially ones rated PG-13, have a predictable “twist” at the beginning of the third act to try to make the audience question who or what the threat really is. The first thirty minutes of the movie lead you to believe the potential sister murderer walking in the woods is going to be the threat, but then it’s revealed that she’s not the one to be concerned with. Even though you know that Ryan was the one keeping someone tied up, you still aren’t sure who he poses a threat to. Through the rest of the film, Ryan is the only threat, so to reveal that early who the threat is but only reveal towards the end the reason why he’s a threat gets some credit from me for at least being different from a lot of other films. Add to that the final reveal of the movie, and considering how big a fan I am of Sleepaway Camp, I thought it was a pretty bold direction to go in for a PG-13 movie. Again, this movie isn’t good, and it’s not scary, but it unfolded as a melodrama that had enough twists and turns to keep me interested.

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The people who made The Grey can fuck right off. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. I had seen trailers for The Grey and wasn’t all that happy with the portrayal of wolves as villains, as you could imagine me being sensitive to. I heard multiple reviews where people said, “Wolves aren’t the villains any more than snow is a villain,” and that wolves were just a representation of one facet of the challenges found when stuck in the wilderness. I was okay with that, and since I was working at a movie theater, I popped my head in a few times and only ever saw ridiculous “facts” being tossed around about the predatory habits of wolves, so suffice it to say, The Grey ended up vilifying wolves in the exact way I had imagined. When it comes to animals like wolves or sharks or bears, I get pretty offended when they are treated merely as a mindless killing machine that’s used to drive the plot forward. As you might have read in my review, Jaws is an exception to the rule in that the movie’s not about the monster, but rather the men facing the monster. Whether it have been a shark or a squid or Cthulhu, it didn’t really matter. This isn’t to say that I’m a giant stick in the mud with movies where I automatically get my panties in a bunch when I movie makes a defenseless animal the villain. I can enjoy the campier things like Piranha with its prehistoric fish or Deep Blue Sea with its genetically altered, super-smart sharks. Knowing that Bait involved killer sharks, I had pretty low expectations, and I got pretty much what I expected.

Not entirely sure if the people who did the CGI have ever seen a shark before, because this thing is fat as shit.

Off the coast of Australia, a man is killed by a great white shark despite his best friend Josh’s (Xavier Samuel) best attempts to save him. A year later, Josh now works in a supermarket and is still dealing with the depression of not being able to save his best friend. While on his way in to work one day, Josh notices strange behavior from animals, which serves as a precursor to the earthquake and tsunami that ends up flooding the supermarket. Trapped in the supermarket is your typical hodgepodge of different characters, from Josh’s ex-fiance to a guy who attempted to rob the place to girl and her cop father, and of course the manager of the store who isn’t keen on taking risks. There’s also a few people trapped in the flooded parking garage, and both the parking garage and supermarket have a great white shark swimming around in them! All these characters attempt to get out of where they’re stuck in all manner of escape, but most of them end up being eaten by one of the two sharks. Eventually Josh is able to get to the car of the policeman, get some weapons, and team up with the attempted robber to not only kill the two sharks, but blow a hole in the debris long enough for everyone to escape. Once back on dry land, all these characters realize there probably wouldn’t have been a rescue team ready to save them, as the entire coast has now been destroyed by the tsunami.

Only now am I realizing that the water doesn’t even flood the fucking door in the background, meaning it’s probably only six feet deep. BUT YEAH, WHERE’D THAT SHARK GO IN THIS MASSIVE ABYSS?

The last movie I saw with killer sharks was Shark Night, and that movie was fucking awful. One of the bigger issues I had with that movie was the fact that, for as ridiculous a premise as that film was, they randomly dropped in some facts about sharks to make it seem like the events of that film could actually happen. Rather than embracing the camp of it, Shark Night took itself just a little too seriously.  On the other hand, I can really enjoy something like Deep Blue Sea in the ridiculousness of super smart sharks hunting people through a giant underground warehouse, especially with how surprising each death was. Bait ends up falling somewhere in between these two films in the seriousness of its tone. Like Shark Night or like Piranha, Bait was also originally released in 3D, so most of the deaths or action shots are an obvious attempt to utilize the 3D technology. On the other hand, we get scenes involving Josh mourning for his best friend and his ex-fiance, who’s also his dead best friend’s sister, consoling him. I think the only thing that could almost be considered a fact would be Josh seeing how far it was from the shark’s dorsal fin to its tail, and using that information to estimate the size of the whole shark. That’s something people can kind of do with some degree of accuracy? One of the most ridiculous things about this whole movie is that, at least with the supermarket location, all of the characters and an almost 12 foot long shark were trapped, but even though it looked like there was only about a million gallons of water, no deeper than 10 feet, these people kept fucking losing track of the shark. HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE SOMETHING THAT BIG SWIMMING AROUND!? Not just that, but the average cruising speed of a great white shark is around 5-10mph, which is definitely a speed you’d notice from a shark that big. Even though I didn’t really like this movie and I can’t really recommend it to anyone, it’s still better than Shark Night was.

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Earlier this week, I was faced with a tough decision. I had to decide between staying home to talk shit about the Oscars on the internet or going to a screening of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce in glorious 70mm. I had never seen Lifeforce, nor had I ever seen a movie that was shot in 70mm. Wait, does IMAX count? I saw that new Batman in IMAX, but I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. Since I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do, I took to Twitter to get some advice. Most of the responses I got were things like: “Yeah! Lifeforce! Do that one!” or “They made Lifeforce in 70mm?” and “BOOBS! 70MM BOOBS!” With overwhelming responses like that, as well as JD using peer pressure to get me to accompany him, I ended up going to a 10pm show. On the way over, I asked JD if this movie was actually good, to which he responded, “It’s alright. I mean, it’s not bad.” WHAT A RAVE REVIEW! I was a little confused that there was such a positive response in regards to me going to see the movie yet no one actually said that the movie was good. If I thought I was confused before going into the movie, actually seeing it didn’t make things any less confusing. This movie’s crazy.

Someone get Calista Flockhart a sandwich! Am I right, guys?!

There’s a spaceship that’s following Halley’s Comet for a reason that I can’t remember at this time. It doesn’t REALLY matter what the reason is, because the crew is sidetracked with finding some sort of spaceship that’s two miles long. On this spaceship, the crew finds two naked dudes and one naked space lady (Mathilda May). The crew then loses touch with Earth, so a different spaceship goes to find that spaceship and brings the three naked people back to Earth. Once there, an autopsy is about to happen on a naked dude but he wakes up and kisses the pathologist and sucks out his, I don’t know, I guess his “lifeforce” or whatever. The three naked people wander around sucking out lifeforces, but then the captain of the ship that found them (Steve Railsback) is found back on Earth in an escape pod. He tells the authorities that out in space, he made out with the naked space girl and they swapped some of their lifeforce. That’s not code for bodily fluids or anything, it just means that now they share some sort of psychic connection. While the captain is trying to track down the lifeforce suckers, the whole city is getting their lifeforces sucked out, causing mass hysteria and quarantines. Once the naked space girl vampire thing is found, the captain realizes he’s in love with her and starts doing her. He’s able to snap out of what he’s doing long enough to shove an iron sword through her and himself at the same time, which shoots the two of them back into the alien spaceship to head to a different planet. OH, OKAY.

I guess this was a nice change of pace compared to the neck biting of other vampire movies, but they’re basically just kissing. This movie has lots of kissing.

What the fuck? There was so much shit happening in this movie that was completely unnecessary and confusing that I’m only just now really understanding what the plot was. Even though that story seems straightforward, I’m leaving out things like Patrick Stewart (with hair) being injected with something that makes him tell the truth or something (?), a scene where the captain beats the shit out a woman for giving some guy a handjob, and an entire trip to the countryside as the city is undergoing a monstrous transformation. Wait…I guess all of those things happened on that trip, so had that entire trip been cut out then the movie would’ve been 30 minutes shorter and a lot less confusing. However, they actually cut OUT a bunch of stuff for this theatrical release, so I can’t even begin to understand the madness in a version that’s longer than this one. There was also some crazy bullshit about how things take two hours. If I understand correctly, if your lifeforce was sucked out, you’d turn into a shriveled up corpse. This corpse would come back to life after two hours, at which point you would have two hours to suck someone ELSE’S lifeforce, and if you didn’t, you’d explode into dust. However, if after two hours of having your lifeforce sucked and you become alive again and then suck someone else’s lifeforce within two hours, you’d look like a normal human instead of a corpse. However, you’d still have only two hours to find another corpse. WHAT’S THE FUCKING DEAL WITH THIS TWO HOUR NONSENSE?! HOW THE FUCK DID YOU FIGURE OUT THESE FUDGY FUCKING NUMBERS?! There’s also a scene where someone tells the captain that the space vampires can be killed, but not by the traditional stake through the heart. Instead, you have to stab them precisely two inches below their hearts, and THEN you’ll be in business. This guy did it ONE TIME and apparently used some precise measurements. I don’t know, maybe the book explained a little bit more of the science and methodology behind everything, but things seemed way too specific and weird.

Well, yes, Mathilda May’s tits ARE the most memorable part of this movie.

Even though the story ended up being a mess, I did appreciate the attempt on Hooper’s part to take on a project that combined multiple genres. I couldn’t help but think that the way Lifeforce was combining science fiction with the supernatural with apocalyptic elements that it was just a ripoff of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Prior to Prince of Darkness, Carpenter had done a bunch of different horror films and then combined them all into this weird, apocalyptic scientific approach to the devil. I figured that Hooper had seen that movie and wanted to do his own version and that’s when Lifeforce was born. After some thorough investigations (going on IMDb), I saw that Lifeforce actually came out before Prince of Darkness and that my theory was bullshit! Still, going forward, if anyone asks me about Lifeforce then I’m just going to tell them it’s a shitty ripoff of Prince of Darkness with vampires instead of Satan. Despite the insanity of the story, I did enjoy Hooper’s monster and gore effects. Seeing someone explode into dust isn’t something you see that often and it was very entertaining. There’s also a sequence involving a Patrick Stewart dummy that’s oozing blood out of its face, and even though the mannequin isn’t at all convincing, there were some weird gravity shifting things going on that were pretty surreal and trippy. I don’t really understand why the film was shot in 70mm, other than maybe it was impressive back in the 80′s, but I guess it’s a credit to Tobe Hooper for realizing the world wouldn’t be able to handle a movie full of Mathilda May’s boobs in 35mm.

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Sorry guys, but horror movies involving creepy little kids don’t really do it for me. I guess that out of all the horror movies I’ve seen involving kids, I end up thinking about how they’re little kids and I am a full grown adult and in a one on one fight, I could probably win. This isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed movies that have evil kids as antagonists, like Citadel and its demonic little thugs or The Children and its theory about there not being accidents when a kid hurts an adult and they really are just being a shithead. All I’m saying is that the mere concept of little kids being creeps isn’t all that exciting for me. However, the recent Come Out and Play piqued my interested, despite not having seen the movie that it was a remake of, the Spanish ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? or Who Can Kill a Child? According to Wikipedia articles, this remake ended up being pretty close in plot to the original film, which was based on a novel, so some of you might appreciate that, but ultimately, this ended up being another creepy little kid movie that I didn’t connect with. Since one of the segments I had strong opinions on was the ending, there’s going to be spoilers in this review, but you can’t really get pissed at me for ruining the ending of a story that has been around for almost 40 years. Got it?

Absolutely no muscle definition whatsoever! Even I could take these kids! Well, at least the little ones.

While on vacation, Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tracks down someone with a boat so he can take his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) to a nearby remote island. Once they get to the island, they have a hard time finding any adults and none of the kids they see running around are pretty unresponsive. When Francis finally sees an older man in the street and attempts to talk to him, the old man is ambushed, attacked, and murdered by a bunch of little kids. SOMETHING WEIRD IS GOING ON HERE! After locking themselves in a hotel, they encounter another adult who explains that in the middle of the night, the kids on the island starting laughing loudly, followed shortly by their parents screaming. As Francis and Beth try to get back to their boat, they are swarmed by the kids and are able to get into a car and drive to the other side of the island. While there, they see some little kids who don’t seem to be affected, but when the kids from the side of the island they just left catch up to them, they stare at the nice kids long enough to make them start acting like dickheads too. The kids overwhelm them and they retreat to a jail where they are able to get a gun from a dead officer, but the kids get one too, and when a kid holds a gun to Beth, Francis shoots and kills him. BETH DOESN’T LIKE THAT. Beth starts complaining of her baby hurting her, starts bleeding from her lady areas and down her leg, and then just dies. Yup, just like that. Dead from the inside. This bums out Francis so he sets her body on fire. After his mourning, Francis goes back out to face the horde of rugrats. Since he has an automatic weapon, he just starts fucking shooting all of them until he runs out of bullets! Since they’re little kids, a bunch of them start crying, so he jumps over them and runs back to his boat. Some of the kids catch up to him, and, being an adult, Francis easily beats the shit out of most of them. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard interrupts his child murdering by shooting him, only to have the little kids kill the Coast Guard and steal their boat to make their way to the mainland. Or maybe to buy some Bieber CDs, who knows, the movie ended there.

Damn, bro! Where’d you get those cool as jeans?!

Dammit, writer/director Makinov! Right at the end there you went from not that great to pretty good and then back to not that great in five minutes! Up until the climax, it was a pretty standard “couple in trouble” story. This couple, ya see, they’re in trouble, and there’s no one who can help them! The lady, ya see, well she’s pregnant! So that makes things difficult! I didn’t really see how her being pregnant moved the story forward, other than it gave the character an easy death at just the right moment that the story needed a death. Some people might say, “Oh so it was her BABY turning evil and killing her!”, while others, like me, would say, “How could that baby have turned evil when having only been on the island for a few hours and with none of the other evil little kids staring directly at it?” That was another issue I had, which was there was really no rhyme or reason as to why these kids ALL started acting like dickheads at the same time, while other kids on the island didn’t react that way. I don’t need everything to be spelled out for me, and I like ambiguity when it comes to those things, but this movie offered no real reason why this stuff happened on this island. I guess in the original, there were some implications that the atrocities of war that these kids experienced and seeing the effects of war on adults is what caused the kids to “take matters into their own hands”, but there was still the whole eye contact thing which I still just don’t get. We also don’t really know why Francis was so desperate to get to the island in the first place, which might seem like a nitpicky thing to single out, but considering how the first few minutes of the movie he seemed so desperate to get to this island, I thought there’d be more significance to the island once they had gotten there. Even though this movie had quite a few things going against it, the scene where Francis basically says, “FUCK THIS!” and starts dominating these little kids was pretty awesome. I’d say that’s always the thought running through my brain when I see “evil children” movies, which is, “Hey, those kids are little and you’re big and strong.” I mean, Francis really goes for it. He just fucking tosses kids into the ocean like they’re…I don’t know, small children? Then the stupid fucking Coast Guard had to show up to give it a “darker” ending or whatever it was and it went back to being not that great. Maybe if you’re terrified of little kids then this movie could be a little creepier, but the unanswered questions I had and sacrificing the logical ending for the more open-ended one made the movie a little disappointing.

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What an inventive name for a horror film! House! I wonder where it takes place! Maybe a house? Maybe a location that’s not a house? Who knows, bro. This film is NOT to be confused with that guy with the cane from that TV show who I guess is kind of a dick but ends up being really helpful. I don’t know, I haven’t seen that show. We’re talking about Shasta McNasty, right? That’s the show? GUYS REMEMBER UPN?! That channel had some crazy ass shows on it. This film also shouldn’t be confused with the Japanese film Hausu, which is crazy as shit. In fact, it was SO crazy that I remember once making a joke on the internet (would you believe it?) about that movie being SO crazy that it should be admitted into the Criterion Collection. Little did I know that it’s actually got a reputation of being pretty crazy and the people at Criterion had already accepted it and released it. Shows what the fuck I know. Wait, what movie did I watch? Oh that’s right, something that I used to kill time because it was on Netflix Instant. AND I ONLY JUST NOW REALIZED THAT THE TAG LINE IS “DING DONG, YOU’RE DEAD”. HAHAHAHA, THAT FUCKING RULES.

Ian Ziering, is that you!?

Luckily for Vietnam War veteran Roger Cobb (William Katt), he’s been able to cope with his post traumatic stress by turning his experiences into books. When his aunt is found to have committed suicide, Roger inherits her house, which is the house where he had previously lived in with his wife and son. Sadly, his son died in the swimming pool one day, and he and his wife got a divorce, so you’d think that he’d want to get rid of the house immediately. While walking around the place, he has powerful memories of the events that have taken place there and he decides to stick around for a while. After being there for a little while, Roger decides to use this time to focus on a new book about his experiences in Vietnam. While writing, he not only experiences flashbacks of some of the terrible things he had done while in Vietnam, as well as visions of terrible creatures living in the house.  Roger is then approached by a pretty neighbor lady who asks for his help babysitting her son, who is around the age that his son was when he drowned in a pool. The babysitting experiences seem to make both flashbacks and monsters in the house more active, and in order to save this little boy, Roger is going to have to confront his inner demons, which are manifested as outer demons! Is that a thing? Outer demons? I don’t know, but he does it and saves the little boy and blows up the demons or whatever the fuck they were. Good job!

Oh shit, it’s the fucking trooper! Run to the hiiiiilllllllllllllsssssssssss!!!!!!!!!

Not really a horror movie, was it? You guys were fooled! This is actually more of a comedy along the line of Cemetery Man or Dead Alive or something than it was horrific. The only problem is it wasn’t really THAT funny. The 80′s had a lot of movies like this, didn’t they? Shit like Night of the Comet or Night of the Creeps where the setup of the movie is for a horror film but the dialogue and events that play out are far more comedic. That’s good for them, but it’s not really my thing. I can do something like Monster Squad, but other than that, I generally prefer that stuff to be one or the other. GUYS DOES THAT MAKE ME A DICKHEAD?! I don’t know, the film started off with a relatively serious tone, and I thought it was an interesting idea to play out some sort of Jacob’s Ladder-esque psychological thriller, but veered off the rails into shitty creature makeup pretty fucking quickly. I guess there could be some nostalgic charm for people who grew up on this movie and the wackiness of it all, but watching it as a grownup dude who just kind of randomly stumbled across it, I wasn’t really impressed. Multiple times you could see the masks of the monsters or whatever shifting around to see the actor’s eyes underneath and the final confrontation was with something that looked like he stepped off of an Iron Maiden album cover. Don’t get me wrong, Iron Maiden is awesome, but their mascot Eddie isn’t really all that scary. GUYS I DIDN’T LIKE THIS BUT MAYBE YOU GREW UP ON IT OR WHATEVER SO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.

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Sometimes you need to revisit things that you might have enjoyed when you were 14 years younger. Sometimes you need to watch PG-13 horror to guarantee that you won’t see too many boobs or gore. Sometimes you need to remember a time where Lili Taylor would be the star of a big budget haunted house movie directed by Jan de Bont. SOMETIMES ALL THESE THINGS HAPPEN AT ONCE! Things were really confusing in 1999 for a variety of reasons, but one reason was that both The Haunting was released, which was a remake of the 1963 film of the same name, and a remake of 1959 film The House on Haunted Hill was also released. WHAT THE HELL, GUYS?! They’re both remakes and they both have “haunt” in the name?! How am I supposed to keep these two straight! Well, with one being rated R and one being PG-13, it made it a little easier to know which one I was going to see in theaters. The joke is that I wasn’t 17 yet, get it? Maybe it was because I was a chicken shit person who wasn’t 17 yeat, but I remember being mildly creeped out when I saw this movie in theaters, despite ALL of the scares coming from CGI. I guess it’s time to see if something that entertained me when I was 14 can entertain me today!

Now THOSE are some fucking outfits from the 1990′s right there.

After her mother passes away, Eleanor (Lili Taylor) is offered an opportunity to participate in a sleep study in a giant mansion. She accepts and meets Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Luke (Owen Wilson) who also agree to participate in Dr. David Marrow’s (Liam Neeson) experiment, even if it means being chained in at the mansion. The subjects aren’t told about the ghost stories of the supposed haunted house, but that doesn’t prevent them for experiencing strange things. When the subjects of the research start exploring the house, they find out that the guy who owned the house tried to have a large family but his wife couldn’t pop them out successfully, so he remarried and just killed kids who worked in a factory and buried their bones in his fireplace. He had spirit children all around him! Eleanor also learns that she is a descendant of this jerk’s second wife and that it was a spirit that got her involved in the sleep study! Whoa! Crazy! The spooky shit intensifies and Luke gets his head chopped off by a giant metal lion and I guess Lily gets the spirit of the previous home owner to come after her, but she leads him to a spirit door? Or something? And he gets sucked into it to go down to Hell? Eleanor dies in the process but then we see the ghosts of the little kids bringing her up to Heaven! Good job! Theo and Dr. Marrow then wait for the gates to be unchained so they can walk towards other movies that get better reviews and make them superstars.

Don’t worry, I’m sure NOTHING weird or creepy could happen in a room like this!

I’m sure plenty of people have memories of this movie being terrible, but come on guys, it’s not THAT bad. Okay, well, it is BAD, but I’ve seen plenty worse. The plot isn’t all that bad, which might be why we’ve seen similar plots in horror movies for decades upon decades. The characters were at least mildly watered-down from other similar, more cartoonish stereotypes we see in movies like these, and the entire cast are generally pretty decent actors. I think the biggest complaint, which is a valid one, was that there isn’t really any tension being built in the film that isn’t completely reliant on CGI. I really don’t remember a single special effect that was achieved practically, and in 1999, people were really excited about what computers could do so Jan de Bont went WAY overboard with showing what computers could do instead of what computers should do. If this movie was made a few decades prior, the effects would have been kind of cheesy and silly, but it would’ve given a little bit of heart to a movie like that. Instead, all of these characters just run around reacting to things that clearly weren’t there while the audience doesn’t connect with any of the imagery that’s intended to be “scary” and everything feels just really shallow and sterile. There’s a reason why gimmicky movies like this or Thirteen Ghosts don’t really work that well as remakes, because you’re completely removing the thing that made the originals entertaining. Yes, it’s a classic ghost story which we’ve seen reinvented and tweaked time and time again over the decades, so it’s not absolutely terrible, but unless you have a thing for a somewhat bisexual Catherine Zeta-Jones, this movie’s not worth a second viewing. Although, I guess saying “bisexual Catherine Zeta-Jones” will interest you, but you also have Owen Wilson attacking a painting with a candlestick.

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Ya know what’s pretty awkward? Watching The Devil’s Advocate with your mom. I mean, not the mom of whoever is reading this, because odds are I haven’t watched ANY movie with her, so I guess I should have specified MY mom. What’s even more awkward than seeing a movie with your mom (again, technically MY mom) would be seeing this movie with her IN THEATERS. There’s no escape! If there’s a sexy scene going on, you can’t get up and walk out like you’re going to the kitchen. You just need to sit there like an idiot! A few months ago, the podcast How Did This Get Made? had an episode about The Devil’s Advocate that reminded me how insane the movie was, and I figured I should revisit it. As if that wasn’t enough reason, I recently hosted a horror movie trivia night and when one round focused on movies with Satan, I threw a question in there about The Devil’s Advocate! Let’s just hope that this movie is as timeless as I remember and there isn’t anything that dates it, like, I don’t know, Delroy Lindo being in it or something.

No guys, even if your sister looks like Connie Nielsen, you should NOT sleep with her. Unless, of course, you want her to birth the Antichrist.

When Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) is able to prove he’s a hot shot lawyer by getting an accused child molester off, he’s offered the opportunity to work for a giant law firm in New York. This law firm is run by John Milton (Al Pacino), and John Milton is NOT the devil. Nope, no way. Kevin proves himself to be everything Milton hired him for, being able to clear charges on a guy who was practicing goddamned voodoo. All this time spent with his new job makes Kevin ignore his wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) who doesn’t seem to be adjusting all that well to this new lifestyle. Strange occurrences start happening to people who try to warn Kevin of just how much power Milton has, and Mary Ann’s frustrations turn to psychological issues and hallucinations that she’s institutionalized for, ultimately killing herself. Things seem to get even stranger when Kevin decides to confront Milton about everything that’s been going on and the streets of New York City are empty. When he finally confronts Milton, Milton reveals that he’s Satan and Kevin is his son. WAIT AL PACINO PLAYED SATAN? NO WAY. Satan then lets Kevin know that this whole plan was to get Kevin to have sex with his hot sister to create the Antichrist  with the only caveat being Kevin must agree of his own free will. Instead, Kevin shoots himself in the head and gets sucked into Hell or something. It doesn’t matter what actually happened, because that’s when Kevin looks up from the bathroom sink and realizes he’s still in court to defend the child molester! He has a change of heart and grants a reporter an exclusive interview who then shapeshifts into Al Pacino! NO KEVIN, YOU STILL FUCKED UP!

Yeah, I’d say this accurately sums up Pacino’s entire performance.

Rather than point out all of the ridiculously bad things about this movie, I’m going to direct you to the hilarious episode of How Did This Get Made? which does a much better job than I possibly could. The biggest problem with this movie is that the idea of “subtlety” got thrown out the window so early on that it’s like a goddamned cartoon. The first hour or so of the movie, I was actually invested in what was happening. The way they explored Kevin’s character, Mary Ann not having enough attention paid to her when she wants a baby, and having her character cut all of her hair off felt very similar to Rosemary’s Baby if it was being told from Guy’s perspective. About an hour in is a scene where Mary Ann is with a bunch of women while they’re changing and one of them reveals a demon face and from there it’s just madness. One character who tries to help Kevin is beaten to death by homeless people, which reminded me of the way Rosemary’s friend Hutch fell into a coma. Rather than taking the subtle route like happened with Rosemary’s Baby, everything is so over-the-top that there’s really no atmosphere built. Also, this movie was almost two and a half fucking hours, so had they decided to cut out all the stuff where they’re showing things that don’t need to be shown, or removed all the scenes where they were trying to establish Kevin’s corruption, the movie could have been a lot better. Add to that the bad acting on Keanu’s part juxtaposed with Pacino losing his goddamned mind, the whole thing feels uneven. As insane as Pacino’s performance was, it was still awesome to see him in a movie where the director was obviously saying, “Do that louder!” the entire time. I kind of enjoyed the idea of exploring characters who profit on setting guilty people free and the effect that might have on someone, but it also felt a little too easy to make Satan be a lawyer. I also wish that they had committed to the ending, because it would’ve meant Keanu Reeves was dead. If this movie wasn’t as long as it was, I’d at least recommend it for Pacino’s performance, but I’m sure you can find some sort of wacky mashup of it on YouTube anyway.

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“The only thing more terrifying than mother nature is human nature.” Hahahaha who fucking wrote that?! That’s so dumb. I mean, I get it, I guess, because I think movies need to have some sort of dumb tagline on it, but that’s so cheesy! After having played at a few different festivals, it seems like Aftershock has been pretty polarizing in its reception. People either love it or they hate it, and the haters are far more vocal about it than the supporters are. I’m sure this movie got added attention with the involvement of Eli Roth as both a lead actor and as a “presenter”, whatever the fuck that means, but considering his prominence in the horror community, you’d figure this movie would have his stamp of approval. Well, I’m sure it was fun for Eli Roth to go down to Chile for to film this, regardless of the film never really finding its groove.

I stand behind more short-haired girls being in horror movies 100%.

Eli Roth’s character, who is simply referred to as “Gringo” throughout the movie, is visiting Chile with some of his friends who are from the area acting as tour guides. The three dude friends end up finding three lady women to start traversing the countryside with. One of Gringo’s friends has a shit ton of money, so he’s able to use his connections to get them into all the bars and clubs they feel like going to. One night at a club, tensions run high amongst all the friends, but that’s not really important when an earthquake interrupts everything and the entire city they’re in starts crumbling down. As if an earthquake happening wasn’t enough, this town also had a prison in it that also collapsed and now a bunch of prisoners are running around the city being absolute shitheads. Looting, murder, setting people on fire, and yes, even rape. All these friends are trying to avoid not only the torn apart city, but are also trying to avoid the crazy assholes being dickheads. Rather than tell you EVERYTHING that happens in the movie, I’ll just say that not all of the friends survive and life sucks for everyone and then the movie’s over. Yay! I did it!

The water balloon fight took a turn for the worse when one balloon got filled with period blood.

The first act of this movie feels a lot like Hostel, in that we just follow the exploits of a bunch of dudes doing dude things. It was relatively entertaining, but nothing we haven’t seen before. I will say that I enjoyed seeing Eli Roth playing the older character who has a daughter, because even though he looks like he’s permanently in college, he’s now in his 40s. Unlike Hostel, whose brash and annoying male leads bring their demise upon themselves, these men are thrown into a terrible situation that was completely outside of their control. I suppose the argument could be made that the juxtaposition of their wackiness in the first half of the film makes the gravity and seriousness of the tone of the second half of the film more dramatic, but I had a hard time feeling bad for these characters, and rather felt bad for the women who had to spend so much time with them. I know that the director, Nicolás López, caught some heat for his depictions of rape int he film, but I didn’t see what necessarily made those scenes any more graphic than anything else int he film. If prisoners are running the streets, it’s just as likely that women will get raped as it is they will murder innocent people. I wasn’t offended by the movie itself, but was caught off guard when I had asked on Twitter who was offended by the rapes and why people were offended by them, only to have López “jokingly” say that “gringos are so sensitive”. If you’re searching Twitter for people talking about your movie, should you really single out people who are attempting to defend the movie? Whether I was offended by those scenes or not, the two conflicting tones of the movie aren’t really my cup of tea, so the combination of drunken frat boys being put through the ringer and a semi-apocalyptic situation of every person for themselves didn’t really click with me. Supposedly the movie is also based on an actual series of earthquakes that hit Chile and left 500 people dead, and if those 500 were murdered by prisoners and raped, it seems weird to turn a profit off of their story, and if they died of earthquake related incidents, it seems disrespectful to those victims by turning that situation into a horror movie. Granted, it could just be a coincidence and it’s an incredibly loose inspiration for the movie and I’m just complaining for no reason. The film kept my attention well enough and some of the special effects were pretty decent, particularly one scene where someone is set on fire, but the movie as a whole isn’t something I particularly enjoyed. Oh yeah, and Selena Gomez is randomly in it for 30 seconds and when it comes to Selena Gomez movies, Aftershock is no Spring Breakers. I’m even willing to bet that there are more terrifying things going on in Ramona and Beezus. On the other hand, what do I know, I’m just a sensitive gringo.

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Humans are pretty big pieces of shit, aren’t they? Just in general, we walk around like a bunch of sophisticated beings, but we’re just a bunch of animals that got lucky enough to be born at a time where we are walking and talking and have the internet. If you don’t believe me, just go to any bar and watch every guy there who forgets they’re a human and watch them try to fuck and fight everything they can. It’s fucking gross. I started hearing about The Purge a couple months ago and heard it being compared to You’re Next for some reason. It turns out that really the only thing they have in common is that both movies have people wearing masks trying to break into a house to murder people, but other than that, there’s really nothing the two films have in common. The biggest thing they don’t have in common is that You’re Next was quite good, and The Purge never really capitalized on the interesting conceptual premise that causes all of the events of the film. Even though The Purge made the audience question what things make us human and whether or not we can remove violence from our society, it ends up making you cheer for all the carnage that takes place in a relatively predictable way.

You’re a giant, Ethan Hawke! You should be able to handle these people very easily!

In the not too distant future, there is a law passed that make all crime legal for 12 hours. No police, no paramedics, no threat of punishment for your actions. The concept is that humans are inherently violent, so by “purging” that violence and aggression into 12 concentrated hours, society will function safely the other 364 1/2 days of the year. The only problem with that is that if you can’t afford weapons or a safe home to live in, you could possibly be killed, leading to a very low unemployment rate due to the amount of homeless people killed. If you make your living off selling home security systems, like James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), then you don’t really have much to worry about. When his son questions why he never participates in The Purge, he and his wife Mary (Lena Headey) reply that they have no anger or aggression to release, but if they did then they might participate. Once The Purge commences, things seem to be going well until the son sees a homeless man wandering the streets and asking for help. The security systems are lowered and the homeless man comes inside, but shortly after, a group of rich, well-educated members of society, wearing masks and led by Rhys Wakefield‘s character, demanding the opportunity to rightfully kill the homeless man. The Sandis’s are then forced to figure out if they’re the type of people who willingly sacrifice someone to save themselves. What follows ends up being a relatively predictable “thriller” with a lot of violence glorification that basically ends exactly the way you think it would.

It was mildly frustrating to watch Lena Headey take the more vulnerable role, especially after seeing how strong she is in Dredd and Game of Thrones. Then again, I’m never really going to complain about watching Lena Headey in anything.

Pretty interesting first act, wasn’t it? Too bad everything went to shit there. Supposedly there were a lot of political themes and background information that ended up being cut out of the final film, which is pretty disappointing because the concept of a world where this stuff happened was the most intriguing thing. I’m not saying that if I took that concept and tried to make my own movie about it that it’d end up any better, but there were some pretty heavy themes that were addressed and ultimately abandoned. The family’s initial reactions towards the homeless man are to sacrifice him, but to do that, they have to use violence to retrain him and overpower him, tapping into their more primal side. When James realizes that’s he’s tapping into his more violent nature, he changes his mind and decides he will take his chances with the intruders so he doesn’t become just like them. Good job, James! You prevented the death of one human to prove you weren’t an animal! What happens next? Oh, well, James then goes on a murder spree where he violently kills at least half a dozen people with guns and axes. Good thing you resisted your violent, primal instincts to…completely embrace your violent, primal instincts? WHAT THE FUCK? Both times I saw this movie was in a packed house, and both times the entire audience was cheering with delight when the blood was spraying all over the screen. This could have been the point that writer/director James DeMonaco was trying to make, but the way the film was constructed and shot was a little too persuasive when it made that violence look “cool”. Those sequences of murder could have easily been shown in a less fantastical way that wouldn’t have tricked you into enjoying the mayhem. There are definitely interesting concepts, ones that I’m personally very interested in, but those concepts seemed to be dropped 45 minutes into the movie and never really explored with maturity.

Even though I didn’t really think these masks were creepy, I do think it was cool that it looked like they were an exaggerated very of Rhys Wakefield’s face. That’s not me trying to make a joke, it really looked like that.

Once you realize that the interesting concept of the whole movie has been dropped after 45 minutes, it’s your typical thriller that’s constantly full of “surprises” and killers that come across as silly instead of violent maniacs. I’d say that Wakefield’s performance as a seemingly sophisticated, rich young man was the best in the film, but even that was somewhat cartoonish. The forced, over-the-top creepiness of the masked intruders was so, so dumb and I couldn’t help but laugh. Masks don’t automatically make intimidating people, especially when there have been so many more effectively creepy masked villains in home invasion movies. The masks the killers were wearing looked like they were taken from the cover of a Goosebumps book, so all the shots of these characters swinging on swing sets or dancing around on the lawn was just irritating as opposed to intimidating. WE GET IT, THESE GUYS ARE CRAAAAZZZZZYYYY!!!! Look at their masks and the way they take murder so lightly! Another device this movie overused was sequences where a character would draw out a murder, only to be surprisingly murdered by someone else. I counted at least four instances of one character taking out a gun or a knife, toying with the person they were about to kill, and right when you think they’re going to kill the person, BOOM! A good guy rescues them. Doing that more than ONCE in a movie can make it feel repetitive, but the amounts of times we were cheated out of seeing an impactful death was super fucking annoying. I feel like to really enjoy the movie, you have to view it as a popcorn movie that shouldn’t be thought about too much or taken for more than just surface level enjoyment, you’re going to get super fucking annoyed like I did about how this movie almost was able to say something about our society and just made you say “AWESOME YOU TOTALLY KILLED THAT LADY!”

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FUCKING ALIENS, AM I RIGHT GUYS?! If you’ve read my recent reviews of Signs or V/H/S/2, you’ll be familiar with the fact that alien movies creep me out. Even if you haven’t read those reviews, now you know that ALIEN MOVIES CREEP ME OUT. I don’t really remember many reviews of Dark Skies when it originally came out, but since when does that matter? I review so much random garbage that I figured I’d try watching a movie that was at least released in theaters. Not only was it released in theaters, but it was released in that prime late winter time of the year where ALL the great horror movies come out! Yikes. Do you guys remember the good old days when horror movies were released and it didn’t say the words “Paranormal Activity” or “Insidious” anywhere on them? How many fucking producers did all of these movies have that now all they have to do is throw ten bucks at a project so that their names can be used on a poster? I most recently fell for this trick with The Purge, and you guys know how that played out. I at least had some hopes that I’d enjoy a movie about aliens more than a home invasion movie, but boy, was I wrong!

There was a moment where I thought this was secretly a Birdemic sequel, but in that moment, I was very wrong.

Weird events start happening to the Barrett family, from their house being broken into and refrigerator ransacked to objects being strangely stacked in their kitchen inexplicably. Around this time, the youngest son in the family starts talking about seeing “The Sandman” in his room, making his parents quite nervous. The strange events start escalating, from birds mysteriously crashing into the windows of their house and dying to the youngest son wandering out of the house in the middle of the night and even family members blacking out and losing hours of their day with no memory of what had happened. After some internet searching, mom Lacy (Keri Russell) finds information that makes her think the family is being visited by aliens. Her husband, Daniel (Josh Hamilton), thinks she’s crazy, but when he sees footage on security cameras that he’s set up that proves maybe there’s some truth to what she’s theorizing. Daniel and Lacy go speak to an “expert” (played by J.K. Simmons) who gives them advice on how to protect their family. Daniel buys a gun, boards up their house, and waits for the aliens to make their move. They do make their move, but the confrontation isn’t quite what the family had expected, leaving them confused and defenseless, and despite their best efforts, the aliens are able to get what they came for.

Oh yeah! I forgot to mention how terrible the CGI aliens looked. Let me use this time to say how terrible the CGI aliens looked.

Goddammit guys, I really wanted to give this movie a shot! Maybe it was because I’ve recently watched alien movies that I enjoy that  this one was so hard for me to get into. There were some segments that worked well enough, like the birds sequence or seeing footage of a shadowy figure standing near the beds of the family, but a lot of the attempts at creating eerie effects fell flat. Characters falling into seizure-like trances with mouths wide open, objects strangely arranged, or a children’s drawing of hanging out with an alien are all things that we’ve seen countless times. Oh shit, not to mention the fact that the kids are the ones seeing the creepy freaks and give it a non-threatening nickname! How many fucking times have we seen that?! I get it, The Exorcist did it so I’m not saying it can’t be done, but does every horror movie with kids and the supernatural have to have that bullshit? And, again, maybe it’s just because I’ve seen Signs so recently, but are you seriously going to have a sequence of all the characters boarding up their house against aliens, sitting down for dinner, and spending time recounting their favorite memories? It felt like it was ripped right out of that movie, except I never really connected with this family dynamic. There wasn’t much chemistry between Russell and Hamilton’s character, let alone their children, although I did enjoy Russell’s performance on its own. J.K. Simmons also played a much more subdued character than he normally plays, which was enjoyable to see, especially when we’ve seen that character before in a much more frantic, paranoid way. I did also enjoy that there wasn’t any forced reasoning as to why this family specifically was chosen by the aliens, and the very last scene ended abruptly after hinting at what happened to one specific character, but the overall generic feel of the whole thing and having to see sequences we’ve seen countless other times made this movie pretty forgettable, even if it does have fucking aliens in it.

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Does anyone remember anything about the first Silent Hill movie? Something about some guy with a pyramid on his head? Or something? Whatever. Even though I don’t remember much about the plot of the first film, there were some cool special effects and some sequences really created a great, creepy atmosphere. Even though I never played the Silent Hill videogame personally, I remember watching friends play it and thought it was awesome how the entire town was full of fog and it was raining ash. I was surprised to find out that they made a sequel to that first movie, because even though it has its own fanbase in the horror and videogame communities, it never really did all that well at the box office. Apparently Silent Hill: Revelation 3D was released in theaters? Are you fucking serious? I had no idea this movie came out in theaters. I also didn’t know that Sean Bean and Kit Harington were in this, who, if you’re like me, you’ll know better as Ned Stark and Jon Snow from Game of Thrones. Even though I hadn’t heard a single good thing about the movie, I figured that maybe if there were some effects that were as cool as effects from the first film, this movie wouldn’t be a complete waste of time, and it’d be cool to see Ned Stark and Jon Snow together again. I think there are going to be spoilers in this review, but lucky for you, I don’t really remember much of what the fuck happened, so it’s possible I got the plot entirely wrong.

HOW DOES HE EVEN SEE OUT OF THAT THING AND WHY’S HIS SWORD SO BIG?!

Some girl who looks like a Fake Michelle Williams (Adelaide Clemens), and will only be referred to as Fake Michelle Williams, has a nightmare of her adoptive father, who I will only refer to as Ned Stark (Sean Bean), getting killed. Luckily, Ned Stark is alive, and he gives us the exposition about how his wife and daughter are still stuck in Silent Hill and for some reason these two keep moving around to new places. When Fake Michelle Williams gets to school, she acts like a real dick by telling everyone that she won’t talk to them on Facebook or Twitter, but another new kid in school, who I will only call Jon Snow (Kit Harington), is totally into it. When Fake Michelle Williams and Jon Snow go back to her house, there’s a note in blood explaining that Ned Stark has been taken to Silent Hill, so the two of them head to this alternate dimension full of scary monsters. As they’re running around Silent Hill trying not to get killed by monsters, they come across Malcolm McDowell in a dress. I don’t know if he said anything important because I got distracted and looked him up on IMDb to see how many movies he’s credited with (224!). Jon Snow takes his shirt off to show Fake Michelle Williams that he’s got a bunch of scars and brands and shit on his chest because he is a kid who grew up in the spooky dimension Silent Hill and he was allowed to leave to join the real world. The person who kidnapped Ned Stark is played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who will now only be referred to as “Albino Trinity”. Albino Trinity tries telling Fake Michelle Williams why it was her father who was kidnapped and I think that’s another moment where I got distracted looking up where Carrie-Anne Moss has been, and when I looked up, Albino Trinity has turned into a Hellraiser-esque Cenobite type of monster and starts trying to kill Fake Michelle Williams. Right when Cenobite Trinity tries to kill her, WHAM! PYRAMIDHEAD SHOWS UP! Remember him? He was in the first movie and has been randomly seen throughout this movie, but good luck if you expect me to explain why he stops Cenobite Trinity. Fake Michelle Williams, Jon Snow, and Ned Stark are all about to leave alternate dimension Silent Hill, but then Ned Stark mentions how his wife is still there, so he stays behind. Fake Michelle Williams and Jon Snow leave without Ned, and even though they get picked up by a truck, we see the fog start forming behind them. I bet something else crazy is going to happen there to someone at some point!

They warned you about not going north of The Wall…plus, this girl could also possibly be Carey Mulligan.

Supposedly this movie was based on the videogame of the same name, so I can’t really vouch for how accurate of an interpretation this movie was of that story. Although I can tell you, that based on someone who was kind of sort of paying attention, I didn’t have much of a fucking clue as to what was happening. Sure, it’s entirely possible that it was my fault, but it’s also possible that the filmmakers didn’t really know what the fuck they were doing and threw in tons of extraneous scenes and characters. I mean, really, Malcolm McDowell in a dress? Did that have anything to do anything in the movie? I doubt it. There was also an Evil Fake Michelle Williams character that I guess was the reason everyone in Evil Silent Hill blamed bad things on? I don’t know guys, what the fuck. I read something where this “franchise” was compared to the straight to video installments of the Hellraiser franchise, and I think that’s an accurate comparison. Despite both franchises featuring confusing, uninteresting plots, it doesn’t really matter because you’re watching it to see what kind of sick and twisted monsters the filmmakers come up with. There was one kind of lame mannequin monster thing that was CGI, but other than that, almost every other creature was done with practical effects. There might’ve been some CGI tweaking, but seeing Pyramidhead and those weirdo disfigured nurses with cool boobs, you got the same feeling from this film as you did with the original Silent Hill, at least as far as Clive Barker worship is concerned. This movie didn’t have as much of an atmosphere as the first film, which really makes the film suffer, but if you’re just looking to see some interesting creatures strung together by a paper-thin plot, then this movie will meet those expectations.

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Talk about the dog days of summer! It’s getting hot out there, guys! Better wear your sunblock and your floppy hats! I generally prefer to watch movies that reflect the time of year or season that I’m currently in to really be able to feel the mood a lot better, but sometimes you have to say fuck it and watch stuff that’s completely the opposite. I was a little nervous about watching Blood Runs Cold as I’d never heard anything about it and sometimes those random movies I get screener copies of can be disappointing. I decided to live a little and roll those dice because, hey, what’s the worst that could happen? I do have to admit that I didn’t realize this movie stars Swedish actors speaking in English with varying degrees of accents so throughout most of the movie I just thought everyone had speech impediments. Clearly it’s my brain that has the impediment.

Screaming for her life or not, I’d gladly Swedish HER meatballs, if you know what I mean! That’s a sexy thing to say, right?

Someone wanders through the cold, covered in snow, before quickly being murdered by another figure. Winona (Hanna Oldenburg) is driving through the snow to stay in a cabin in her hometown to take a break from her musical career. Wanting to get out of the house, she bumps into her old boyfriend Richard (Patrick Saxe), who she invites back to her cabin along with two of his friends. There’s some drinking, there’s some tomfoolery, there’s some sexy times, and there’s some violent murders. A snow-covered figure, wearing what appears to be old miner’s equipment, is stalking the group of friends and is trying to dispose of them. They meet their grisly demise, one by one, and any attempts to wound or maim this miner just result in a puff of steam escaping from his body. It’s up to Winona to try to figure out what’s going on, what’s happening to her friends, and how she can escape her vacation alive.

Was really hoping they’d reveal the murderer to be a Swedish Yosemite Sam.

You’re trying to tell me that a group of friends going to a remote cabin could end poorly?! YA DON’T SAY! The movie is pretty straight forward in setting up this group of friends to be sacrificed to whatever mysterious thing is that is set on destruction. We don’t really get to spend enough time with any of the characters to connect to them, so there’s not too much sympathy when any of them are killed. Another issue with Blood Runs Cold is that there was such a small cast of characters, so every death was a removal of 25% of the cast. One of those characters was even killed off-screen! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?! It was especially disappointing because the few segments of violence were done with practical effects and were done pretty well. I also enjoyed the fact that the antagonist seemed to be part ghost, part zombie, part cannibal, with really no explanation whatsoever of who he was or how any of this was happening. A lot of movies think they can be original by inventing some new mythology, but Blood Runs Cold went the opposite direction and just let the audience fill in the blanks. All we needed to know was that there was something killing these kids and couldn’t be stopped by conventional means. The ending was really abrupt, so much so that I skipped back to watch the ending again to see if I missed something, but nope, just kind of ends out of nowhere. I noticed one of the reviews on the back mentioned it being short, and wondered why that would be considered a good thing, but the movie clearly hit all the points it wanted to and didn’t feel the need to drag it out arbitrarily. The film had a couple of decent effects and ended before you could get bored with it, which is more than I can say for a lot of other garbage that I watch, but ultimately there weren’t enough things I enjoyed to think to highly of it.

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I recently had to drive to a wedding that was out in West Virginia, and while driving there, I wondered what the fuck West Virginia was known for so I knew what sights and sounds I should be on the lookout for. I started reading about the movies that were set in West Virginia, and while things like The Descent, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, and Wrong Turn jumped out at me, it was one movie in particular that really stood out: The Mothman Prophecies. I remembered that the movie involved a bridge that connected Ohio with West Virginia, and it turns out that I had to drive over that bridge! Knowing that on my drive back from West Virginia I would be looking to take advantage of the local sights and sounds, I found out there was a Mothman Museum I could go to! If you want to see all of my pictures from the experience, I recommend looking at my Instagram to see what a blanket that Richard Gere came into contact with looks like. Having spent the whole day thinking about Mothman, I figured I’d give this movie another shot.

Who fucking drew this? Someone with a brain tumor or something?

Richard Gere and his wife, played by Grace from Will & Grace (Debra Messing), are searching for a new house to buy and Grace gets so fucking turned on by Richard Gere that she starts trying to have sex with him in a closet. Sadly for Grace, having sex with Richard Gere causes lasting brain damage and also makes you hallucinate dark figures with giant wings and glowing red eyes, which caused her to get into a car accident. AND A BRAIN TUMOR. That was probably from having sex with Richard Gere, right? I don’t know anyone who’s had sex with Richard Gere and lived to tell the tale, so I’m sticking to that. Which reminds me, Grace dies of a brain tumor but until after drawing this red-eyed figure all over the goddamn place. Years later, Richard Gere is driving from Washington, D.C. and has car troubles in Point Pleasant, WV. This makes sense only if you have no idea of geography or logic and think it’s understandable to drive five hours due west instead of 3 hours south, but whatever. When he gets his car inspected and finds out that it’s totally fine, he starts hearing rumors of sightings of something that looks similar to the figure that his wife was drawing. As the sightings increase, this being also starts using a phone to contact different people, including Richard Gere, and tells Richard to switch over from Burt’s Bees to Chap Stick…I think? The phone calls start giving details about disasters, and considering his wife died after seeing this figure, he kind of starts freaking out thinking that this “Mothman” is a harbinger of bad things, making him fearful of the residents of Point Pleasant. After he’s contacted about some disaster on the Ohio River, Richard thinks it’s a chemical plant, but it ends up being that the bridge going over the Ohio River collapses which results in the death of almost 50 people, and no one in town reports having seen the Mothman ever again. In other words, that Mothman was a giant dickhead that smashed a bridge.

This isn’t from the movie, but from my trip to the Mothman Museum. Not pictured is the non-creepy lip balm.

When I saw this movie 11 years ago, it didn’t scare me. In all subsequent viewings, it hasn’t scared me. For some reason, any time I mention this movie to anyone, they say that it’s creepy. WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?! Am I talking to the wrong people? Have people just not seen this movie in ten years and only kind of remember what happened in it? There were a few decent sequences, like the one where Richard Gere gets a phone call from the Mothman and is told all of the items of his motel room or the idea that Mothman doesn’t need to explain himself to humans the way humans don’t talk to cockroaches, but they never really settled on what the tone of the movie was intended to be. The idea of some supernatural entity appearing as different things to different people and being able to use a phone is creepy in theory, but the tone of the movie never really reflected this concept all that well. The movie felt more like an investigation of the concept of the Mothman, more similar to something like The Exorcism of Emily Rose or maybe Red Lights, but when your main character totally buys into the supernatural elements of what’s going on, it kind of takes away the audience’s chance to determine what’s really going on. I also had a personal issue buying into any of the stuff going on in the movie when I knew that the “truth” that this movie was based on was multiple sightings of a large, dark, winged figure, probably a bird that wasn’t indigenous to the area, that lasted for about a year. Nothing about phone calls or interacting with people or anything like that, just some people stopped reporting having seen something like it after a bridge collapsed.  The music and cinematography were kind of cool, but it felt like it tried to take a small, isolated, creepy story and blow it up into this worldwide phenomenon that didn’t need to last a whole two hours. It could’ve been a much tighter 90 minute movie that cashed in on the name “Mothman”, or it could’ve been an opportunity to explore the mob mentality of group hallucination in a relatively isolated area, but it was neither. What the fuck, guys? And you didn’t even show me Richard Gere’s butt.

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I wouldn’t necessarily say that WWE Studios have built themselves all that impressive of a reputation with the films they’ve produced, but I also can’t say that I’ve seen a single fucking one of them. They’ve generally been action films, as they always cast at least one wrestler in it, and if action alone wasn’t really my thing, action movies starring wrestlers REALLY aren’t my thing. Even though the first thing I saw in the trailer for No One Lives was the logo for WWE, I was kind of surprised to not notice the obvious incorporation of a famous wrestler. I did notice that America Olivo was in it, who I’ve now seen and enjoyed in both the Maniac remake and in Friday the 13th. She’s not a wrestler, is she?! Holy shit guys, she’s probably a wrestler. I LIKE A WRESTLER?! Then I guess it’s okay that I watched this movie! There are spoilers ahead, so travel at your own risk….OF BEING BODYSLAMMED!

Luke Evans was definitely doing his best Frank Castle impersonation, and for the cheesiness of the movie, I think it worked.

So there’s this dude, played by Luke Evans, and his girlfriend moving across country or something when they see a new report about a girl who escaped a house where 14 of her friends were murdered.  Meanwhile, a group of criminals are robbing a giant mansion, only for the residents of this mansion to come home and subsequently be murdered by these criminals. Would you believe that these criminals cross paths with Mr. Evans and then capture him and his girlfriend? DAMMIT, LUKE. WHY WOULD YOU TRAVEL NEAR CRIMINALS?! Once the criminals tie up our happy couple, they go into the trunk of their car and discover…THE GIRL WHO ESCAPED THE MURDERS ALL TIED UP AND SHIT IN THE TRUNK! Uh oh, that’s weird. When one of the criminals kills the girlfriend, you can imagine that Luke gets pissed and kills this big old fat dude who was probably a wrestler. The criminals hold onto the kidnapped girl, also having seen on the news that she’s worth money, but Evans’s character gets into his trailer and booby traps the house they’re staying in. He murders the criminals one by one, showing affection towards the girl who was in his trunk. When she’s finally the only one left, we learn that he has put some sort of tracking device in her stomach, leaving a scar that is the exact same kind of scar as the first girl he was with! These aren’t his girlfriends, he’s just a fucking weirdo who kidnaps girls and puts tracking things in them! Anyways, he leaves her to die, but finds one criminal who made it to the hospital and says, “No one lives,” similar to the name of the movie, then kills him! Then there’s ten minutes of credits!

Hey! Who’s that with America Olivo?! It’s that girl from Silent Hill: Revelation that looks like a fake Carey Mulligan! Cool!

Even though I had heard nothing good about this movie, and it was produced by the WWE and featured a wrestler, I ended up kind of enjoying it. WHOA, GUYS, DON’T GET CONFUSED, THIS MOVIE WAS NOT GOOD. All I’m saying is that there were a few things that surprised me. Even though I knew there was that twist of the girl in the trunk, it was surprising to see which character had her in their trunk and how early that reveal was made. At that point in the movie, not really knowing the plot, I thought it was just another typical “couple on a road trip” torture movie, so I enjoyed that reveal early on. Once it happened, it felt similar to something like The Last House on the Left or I Spit On Your Grave where you knew the villains deserved everything that was coming to them and enjoyed seeing them meet their ends. I didn’t look it up until afterwards, but when I found out that this director, Ryûhei Kitamura, also made Midnight Meat Train, the over-the-top gore made perfect sense. There were heads chopped off, people being dropped into giant grinders and their soupy guts put in a burlap sack, and even a scene where a skinny guy hides INSIDE the body of a dead guy. The twist at the end about the tracking device was obviously far-fetched and ridiculous, but it was a nice little gag to tie the ending into some of the stuff we had seen earlier on. If you’re looking for a flimsy plot that really only serves the purpose of throwing some gore around, albeit CGI gore, than No One Lives isn’t all that bad, but if you’re looking for interesting characters or a good script or anything like that, feel free to pass on this one.

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