I’m all for familiar frights, but none of these films hit the mark for me. Let’s get right into them.
CHEAT (2023)
I was at first totally engrossed in this throwback to girl ghost movies of the early 2000s.
After we see a man sacrifice a girl in the old days (no, I don’t mean the 1980s), we meet a young woman in the present who is going away to school in a small town. She soon begins seeing a girl in a white dress wherever she goes.
She learns from her new school friends about a town curse—a high rate of suicides, and anyone who has a cheating affair is doomed to death.
Cue the cheating and affairs.
There were some plot points that had me intrigued. For instance, adulterers find themselves bleeding from their private areas. Now that’s the kind of terrifying, supernatural revenge I’m talking about.
Unfortunately, that’s not at the heart of the horror, and this turns into another basic ghost girl in white horror movie that steals from The Ring but simply isn’t very scary. It’s the typical premise of the main cast of characters investigating the backstory of the ghost to learn how to vanquish her.
There’s a hella confusing chase scene in which one of the terrified characters just breaks off from her friends for no reason and ends up alone, running through a bunch of locations that make no sense—for instance, she runs into the ground level of a building, runs up approximately ten flights of stairs, gets to the top…and then runs out onto a ground level street. What the hell? Was this building supposed to be built into the side of a mountain?
The final battle with the ghost is so silly that I actually laughed, and the final scene basically has our main girl just doing what most other people would have done before all their friends began dying…she just leaves town…and leaves a trail of dead bodies behind. Awesome.
WHEN IT RINGS (2023)
This is a plot you’ve seen before, usually in bigger budget films, and it’s longer than it needs to be, with little in the way of chills and thrills.
A young man returns to his home with his dad when it’s time to sell, because his mother, who still lives there, has pretty much shut down ever since their daughter died at a young age in the family pool…or so it seems.
The son finds a toy phone that used to belong to his little sister and is very quickly plagued by nightmares and visions of the phone and his (still alive) mother terrorizing him.
The house definitely feels haunted, but this isn’t a very haunting experience. The phone keeps popping up and ringing, the son is struggling to remember his life in the house, and the dad and mom both seem to be harboring secrets.
As the son and an old female friend from the neighborhood reconnect and try to uncover the truth of what happened to his sister, things at last pick up in the final act—but not much. The plot starts to feel like a mashup of elements of The Grudge and The Sixth Sense, only without a ghost in sight.
MALICE (2024)
This film comes across as an homage to both the original Evil Dead and the remake and is loaded with the kind of trippy, surreal, freaky setups and sequences of nasty, low budget, direct-to-video era horror that gave genXers nightmares in the early 80s. It’s also the staple style of the creators, the Crum brothers. I’m a fan of their movies, but I have noticed their films have been getting more and more nonsensical, leaving me to just revel in the horrific elements the craft while putting up with the painful deficit in plot and cohesion. I was also disappointed that the cutie Crum brothers, who usually star in their films, stayed behind the camera this time.
The opening scene absolutely sets the tone and draws you in. An adult man in a rundown house is talking to his mother, who we never see…until he opens her bedroom door to see her on fire. Total horror chaos ensues, and for no logical reason, the sequence keeps cutting to clips from the classic Carnival of Souls. I can only assume it’s supposed to be playing on a television somewhere in the house, but we never actually see the TV, so the clips are jarring, distracting, and pointless.
Next, two girls come to the same house, apparently a family house, to meet contractors to fix it up. How they don’t know about the mother and son that were living there is never explained. The contractors show up, tour the house to see what work needs to be done, and find a body. Insanity immediately breaks out.
There’s a demonic female presence just beyond a dark doorway, and characters scatter, coming in and out of the cabin with no rhyme or reason. They also react in the oddest, most unfazed ways to horrific situations—like a demon woman riddled with razors blades giving one girl a gruesome lap dance (awesome) while a guy who could very well help her just sits and watches.
In true Evil Dead fashion, individuals begin getting possessed and going after others, and that horror was all I had to cling to as any other hint of a storyline went out the window. Unfortunately, just when I was willing to let go of all but the visual horror aspects, a talking goldfish puppet came on the scene and absolutely destroyed any credibility Malice had as a horror film. Sigh.
Highlight of the film for me? A fricking blender scene. Eek!
