That is the question I asked myself as I checked out three horror flicks featuring deformed and grotesque humanoid beings.
THE PRICE WE PAY (2022)
The one thing this cliché movie has going for it is that the absolutely ludicrous final fight between the main characters and the “monster” is super gory and violent.
Stephen Dorff and two other dudes rob a business and force a young woman who witnessed the crime to be their getaway driver. The clever little wrench thrown into their plan is that her car sucks. It breaks down, so they walk to a nearby farm to crash for the night.
Somehow, the film fails to deliver any sense of suspense, tension, or build-up as the group settles in and explores the property, but eventually they get knocked out and strapped down to operating tables by a crazy dude and a huge, deformed woman for organ harvesting. That’s it. That’s pretty much the whole movie.
There’s some nasty mutilation during surgery without anesthesia, and the main girl becomes the hero, but first, Dorff gets cut open, gets stapled back together by the main girl, and then has a fight with the deformed woman while wearing a diaper.
It’s so bad, and it just gets even more laughable as the main girl takes on the deformed woman. However, the final fight is deliciously gnarly.
BLOODY EYES (2025)
I had cheesy horror hopes when this film opened in a neon lit lab with scientists injecting something into a dude wearing a sack over his head.
My hopes were crushed for a majority of the film, with the exception of one of the main cops being a cutie.
The script somehow manages to have a group of cops knee-deep in solving a crime that they talk about in circles for the whole movie without ever giving the audience any details as to what case they’re cracking wide open. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Their secretive investigation quickly leads them to the underground lab, where they spend a majority of the movie walking around with flashlights in search of something. What exactly that is I don’t know, but it ends up having something to do with lab samples, the most obvious aspect of the plot.
42 minutes in the cute cop finally spots the sack head guy from the beginning, sans sack and showing off his deformed face while he’s eating someone. Awesome.
64 minutes in someone else finally gets attacked. Within only about 20 minutes left, most of the remaining characters face off against the monster all at once. The “action” is entirely low energy, with almost every scene involving the monster presented in slow motion with the audio levels turned down low and muffled. What the hell? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a monster movie loaded with guys waving guns sabotage itself this badly.
NEVER BLINK (2025)
If Flatliners had a great creature and sloppy storytelling, it would be Never Blink. The film needed to streamline its scientific angle, simplify the experimentation elements, and trim down the runtime by about 20 minutes.
The title does fit, and there are fun moments when the camera view seals up to darkness like closing eyelids, but for a movie not called Bloody Eyes, this one actually has a lot of bloody eyes, unlike Bloody Eyes.
The general premise is a goodie. A professor at a medical school presents his students with the notion that blinking makes up to 48 minutes of our day during which we’re not actually seeing anything, so what if there’s something there in those “blind” minutes? Eek!
Of course there is something there for the sake of this movie, and the students begin to see it materializing and coming for them in the non-blinking world. That is the problem, however. It’s never quite clear exactly how this other dimension is being triggered. The students aren’t experimenting on themselves, so why are they all having encounters with this creature? Is just one of the affected patients they are working with bringing it into reality? Is it the experimental drug they are using? No idea, but the only thing to remember is…never blink!
The characters definitely give off a nostalgic, early 2000s horror movie vibe, and there are attempts at character building, but none of the traits have any impact on the movie. One guy is selling drugs from the lab. Doesn’t matter. Another guy states that he is gay, Black, and has visions. Doesn’t matter. The main girl is having nightmares. Why? Not explained.
We never really get any answers to anything. There are occasional sightings of the creature that is preying on them, and it’s fricking awesome. The horror visuals only get better in the final act when the surviving students decide to meet the monster on its own plane of existence. The horror action gets creepy and gory, plus we get a hot guy shirtless along with an odd number of closeups of his crotch. That and the final freaky fight, which has a 90s techno battle throwback feel to it, are definitely the horror highlights here.
Well, not exactly. In the opening bloody dream sequence, the main girl squishes a mutilated body’s intestine underfoot, and I blurted out, “If you think about it, it’s kind of like stepping in poo”, which gave my hubby a giggle. That was the highlight for him.
