A smorgasbord of horror subgenre movies!

Possession (supposedly), psychic power slasher, wrong place wrong time horror, and a road trip slasher! So let’s get right to it.

THE POSSESSION OF DAVID O’REILLY (2010)

So I think this is a film that isn’t found footage but looks exactly like found footage, unless someone was carrying a camera around and I didn’t notice because I was too bored…which took effect pretty early on.

David knocks on his friends’ door in the middle of the night because his wife is a cheating slut. So the couple lets him stay. And then David starts to act irrational, convinced there’s something in the house with them. He sleepwalks. He wakes up screaming. He runs around the house warning them of danger. And they spend the movie chasing after him in the dark with a flashlight…or is that a camera light? Again, not sure if this is found footage or not.

What I know it isn’t is a possession movie. There are actual monsters moving around the house. We get very vague glimpses of them now and then, which is the best part of the movie.

That right there is the best part of the movie. You be the judge….

There’s also a cool scene that I think was suggesting the wife got possessed with a demon baby in David’s imagination? Who the fuck knows or cares. Finally, a knife comes out because people need to die.

PATRICK (2013)

It’s Carrie in a coma! And Patrick, a remake of a 1978 film, gets big points simply because scream queen Sharni Vinson of You’re Next and Bait is the main girl. She makes everything better.

Actually, Patrick is not all that bad. Sharni gets a job at a dreary, creepy psychiatric hospital. Rachel Griffiths of Six Feet Under is the scary mean head nurse. And there’s a patient named Patrick who is supposedly in a major coma. But Sharni is convinced he communicates with her.

He does more than that! Pretty soon, he’s offing anyone who stands between he and Sharni using what appear to be psychic powers! But not before we get what at first is some great ominous atmosphere and an unsettling tone…that is soon spoiled by so many faux jump scares you become numb to them.

But there’s a shift as the move progresses and it takes on a very cool classic, gothic horror vibe (thanks in large part to Rachel Griffith’s one major sequence). Plus, adorable Martin Crewes of the first Resident Evil movie comes into play as a love interest for Sharni.

And the final act is bloody, violent, and delivers other dimensional male nudity—not Martin Crewes, but still nice to look at.

247 F (2011)

A movie about kids stuck in a hot sauna. Let’s see. Scout Taylor-Compton and Tyler Mane (Michael Myers to her Laurie Strode) reunite briefly. Travis Van Winkle (Rites of Passage, Bloodwork, Friday the 13^th remake, Asylum, Left in Darkness) shows off his hot bod for most of the movie. Gorgeous Michael Copon (Killer Holiday, Night of the Demons remake, Dark House) gets shirtless and sweaty.

Other than that…it’s a horror movie about kids stuck in a hot sauna. I laughed out loud at the first ominous music cues signifying that the sauna is supposed to be scary. Scout gets claustrophobic and loses her shit just a little less than she did in Halloween II.

They try to smash the window on the sauna door for air. They succeed. Someone decides to fuck with the light in the sauna, gets electrocuted, and blows the light, plunging them into darkness. Asshole. There’s a girl fight. There’s a big gas heating system they are afraid to mess with because it might explode. Once again, the asshole steps in….

KILLER HOLIDAY (2013)

It’s pretty obvious from the beginning of Killer Holiday that it is the work of a first time horror director who wanted to make a sleek, cool slasher with metal music, funky sequences, and a unique filming style on a low budget. These telling signs that may annoy some are the kinds of things that actually give films like this their charm.

Kids go on a road trip in an RV, stop at an abandoned amusement park, and are chased and killed by a maniac with a knife. You see this kind of stuff on the Chiller Network and the SyFy Network all the time, so you should be able to handle the cheap thrills here. After a pretty cool and brutal first murder sequence, the murderer hops in a car and follows the RV. No mystery here. The psycho is gorgeous Michael Copon…yep, the same gorgeous guy from 247 F above. And no mask hides that beautiful face. He’s proud of his killer face.

Highlights at the amusement park are the Death Castle (which provides a haunted attraction walkthrough scene) and the bottle maze. The kills are pretty unique and provide some bloody fun, the cast is likable, Copon is delicious as the killer, there’s good old-fashioned slasher movie sex (wahoo!), there’s a Scream-esque twist as to the killer’s motive, and there are cheap final scares.

The big mysterious loose end in the movie…why was there so much focus on the microwave door in the RV constantly being opened, requiring characters to close it over and over?