You know how it is when you watch a horror film that doesn’t quite grab you, yet doesn’t actually suck. Well, I just struck a wave of four of them.
DEAD STILL (2014)
If the video game Fatal Frame were a movie…it would be a lot scarier than this. Dead Still originally premiered on SyFy in October of 2014, and it makes sense. The movie throws in plenty of cheesy fun horror clichés, including a scary mansion filled with candelabras, thunder, lightning, and creepy paintings, but unfortunately, it walks away from that setting and ends up all over the place.
A photographer takes his son to the old mansion of his great grandfather. There, he finds an awesome camera, which the great grandfather was known to use for taking photos of dead people. He begins to use it, and a ghoul occasionally pops up in front of the lens.
After characters come in and out, numerous plot points are tossed our way, and settings change regularly, the dad and son end up in the camera, essentially. In this alternate dimension, they’re in the mansion, confronting the great grandfather (Ray Wise), and dealing with a small army of ghouls that were once the subjects of great grandad’s photos.
The movie is pretty much as disjointed and chaotic as walking through one of those haunted attractions at Halloween. It’s kind of fun in the moment, but you really won’t remember anything about it a month from now.
LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS (2009)
Imagine a British horror comedy about lesbian vampires, starring James Corden as one of the slayers. The sky’s the limit with how campy and comic this one could be. Unfortunately, it never touches the clouds.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s cute, James is cute, the cast is charismatic, and there are some funny moments, but overall the movie just never goes for it. It feels way too restrained considering the subject matter. The best part for me was that every time they stake a vamp, she essentially bursts into a big splash of spooge. So essentially, lesbian vampires jizz when you impale them.
The plot is simple. Corden and his buddy (Mathew Horne, who played Culture Club’s Jon Moss in a movie called Worried About the Boy) head to the countryside and end up in a cabin with a bunch of hot babes…who become victims of a lesbian vampire’s curse.
While I laughed a lot less than I’d hoped to, the look and feel of the film is great, seeming to give a nod to classic Hammer films, with beautiful vampires frolicking in the woods in flowing white dresses. Plus, the kill effects during the final battle are fun.
SOME KIND OF HATE (2015)
Some Kind of Hate isn’t unlike the bullied-kid-comes-back-for-revenge flick Tormented, which I blog about here. However, that film is much more fun than this one.
Ronen Rubinstein (Jamie Marks is Dead, Condemned) is a bullied teen sent to a camp for troubled kids…where he is bullied all over again. When he utters the words “I wish they were all dead” out loud…voila! His dead bullied kid genie appears and grants his wish. This bitch is a walking dead voodoo doll. All she has to do is cut herself with a razor blade and her victims get sliced open! Good luck trying to run away. Bitch can just hack off a leg and you’re face down in the dirt.
The dead girl looks dead enough and there’s plenty of blood, but don’t expect anything scary here—especially since you want the victims to die because they’re asshole bullies. I kind of liked the final battle scene best. There is also a suggestion of self-loathing homosexuality. Aside from all the bullies always calling Ronen a fag, one of the main bullies at one point pulls down his pants and begins spanking him! Even one of the other bullies is kind of like WTF? Hehe.
CONTRACTED: PHASE II (2015)
To catch you up, well, you could read my blog about the first film here. But the gist is, in the first movie some mysterious dude fucked a corpse. Then he had sex with a chick who was on her way to going full-on lesbian. Then she experienced disgusting body horror as she became infected with some disease that caused her to rot and do other oozy icky things. Eventually, she became a horny zombie and banged whoever she could get her pussy on.
Now, one of the guys she banged is getting the same disease. However, he remembers the mysterious man from the first movie. He’s on a hunt to find that man before it’s too late, as are the cops, who are investigating the dead bodies left over from the first movie.
Essentially, Contracted: Phase II is the action adventure version of the first movie. It’s Contracted for guys! The social commentary about sex and sexuality presented in the first film is tossed aside for a more exciting flick. The infection begins to spread (seriously, nacho cheese dip is the culprit) and things get kind of Quarantine by the end. Unfortunately, no one is quarantined, so there will be another sequel. And, like the Saw series, it looks like the movie will be going in a direction much bigger than it originally intended.
Pingback: The Christmas Corpse | BOYS, BEARS & SCARES