It’s subgenre insanity time as I knock a trio of random flicks off my watchlists. Let’s get right into them.
THE LURE (2015)
This Polish film is a really dark and sleazy horror musical, landing it on the screamin’ and singin’ page, and it features a variety of song styles that add some flavor while also capturing the essence of the nasty tone. It’s not a pleasant experience, and as such it kind of reminds me of Cabaret. It’s gross and icky.
A cabaret club scores two mermaid sisters and exploits them as part of the show. On top of that, both men and women at the club are sexual predators that take advantage of the mermaids and the “slot” that each has in her tail when she gets wet. We’re talking fingering scene. Ew.
The sisters have different feelings about being on land. One sister falls for a young man at the club, while the other one goes out and feasts on men. That’s the one thing the movie needed more of. There simply aren’t enough kills to show how much of a monster she is. This is more (mermaid) character study than horror.
The relationship between the sisters starts to fracture as they chose different paths in life, and they begin to take everyone in the club down with them. As a result, the people at the club turn on them and dump them back in the ocean, which leads to another disappointing, missed opportunity to deliver on the horror—the sisters return, but they really don’t get revenge on the cabaret family that betrayed them.
As it delves deep into the conflicting desires of the two sisters in a gruesome way in the final act, the film is a downer, which is the only place for it to really go.
SKINJACKER (2024)
There are plenty of other movies with the same basic premise as this one—with more scares and suspense than this offers. Not to mention, better character development.
While the isolated island setting and atmosphere are well established quite quickly, it’s the initial reaction to a strange occurrence that is the first red flag for a problematic experience. A woman and man wake up after hearing a loud sound. They quickly run over to her parents’ home to find they’re not there. Minutes later when they are back home, her father appears in a stupor with blood dripping down his face, and she literally starts asking him why he’s acting weird and to stop fooling around rather than running over to him with shock and concern. WTF?
Following that we meet several more random people who just seem to be wandering around with no clear motivation. The only one who stands out is a dude with a snarky attitude about how obviously shady he is. In fact, he’s the only one who gets some backstory later on in forced, black and white flashbacks.
Anyway, we see one guy get dragged off by something that’s growling. Then the various strangers conveniently all meet up, people continue to disappear, the rest lock themselves in a house, and several of the missing people show up outside the door acting like zombies for a brief Night of the Living Dead moment.
Eventually the group finds a glowing spot in the hills where it appears something crash landed. They go down into an opening and find themselves in some sort of alien container.
Tell me you’ve never seen Samara in action
without telling me you’ve never seen Samara in action
All we get out of the deep dive into the ground is some attacks by the zombified people before the survivors just climb out of the container, destroy the hole, and decide that they can’t tell anyone because no one would ever believe them.
Seriously, there’s not much more to it than that. It’s all just weird and underdeveloped.
ARISEN (2015)
Time for another episode of ScareBearDan’s “indie horror movie that shouldn’t have been two hours long”. Making things worse, the editing is sloppy, the music is often much louder than dialogue, sound completely cuts out at times, mostly during outdoor scenes, and dialogue spoken in outdoor settings gets drowned out by wind blowing against microphones.
The movie itself is just as messy. The opening scene takes place at Christmas time. A kid is brought into a children’s home handcuffed because he apparently killed a family. Then…a different kid kills other kids in the home. At least, I think it’s a different kid who was already in the home, unless there’s a brief flashback moment to him arriving in handcuffs and I just didn’t realize it was.
As if things aren’t confusing enough already, this opening scene has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot as far as I can tell.
Next, it’s Halloween. There’s a house party. They use a Ouija board with little fanfare. Then one of the guys disappears while walking home.
A year later, his sister is still grieving his disappearance. Detectives are still on the case. Apparently, Halloween now coincides with the brother’s birthday, because she’s throwing one in his honor. There are absolutely no Halloween decorations anywhere. Someone does speak the famous “one good scare” line from Halloween, and her last name happens to be Wallace. Double meta groan.
A towering man who looks like a corpse starts going after her friends. His visual appearance is the best part of the movie. I don’t know if he’s her brother. I don’t know if he’s the kid from the beginning all grown up. I don’t know if he was conjured the night they used the Ouija board the year before. I don’t know why he’s after all of them. Unless I just couldn’t hear the explanation for all this madness over the sound of the wind hitting the microphones, none of it is ever clarified, but there is a final confrontation between the sister and the killer.
