It’s a trio of supernatural flicks that want so badly to make us jump in terror. Did it work on me? Let’s find out.
THE DESERVING (2024)
This 75-minute movie is not really my thing. It’s one where the killer is essentially portrayed as the victim…although the title tells the real story.
We meet a mute photographer who brings women to his home for photoshoots and then kills them. He seems like a very nice guy, and the mood of the film captures his loneliness and lack of communication with other humans.
We also get flashbacks in which we see that he had an abusive father, providing insight as to why he murders women. Personally, I didn’t give a fuck about his sob story when typical corpse-faced ghost girls began terrorizing him.
The film throws all the ghost girl scares in the book at us and they are just so predictable and never succeeded in bringing me to the edge of my seat. Eventually the ghost girls swarm him, sitting around cackling like Deadites in Evil Dead.
The movie is definitely going for a psychological study of a killer’s mind, but I was so not there for it. It also ends with a twist that, while done many times before, feels a little different and more clever here than usual.
THE PAINTED (2024)
This one is very reminiscent of all the supernatural haunted house flicks of last decade, so if movies like The Conjuring unnerved you, this is a nice throwback to that style of supernatural storytelling.
A woman is made the executor of a distant cousin’s estate, so she and her family go to the cousin’s dark, shadowy house to settle things. Once there, they begin to experience strange occurrences, including physical attacks while sleeping.
Before long, they discover that painted portraits hung on the walls are fricking crawling off the canvas and roaming the house. Eek!
It’s pretty effective at first, but obviously it’s not a concept that can prolong itself, so the family eventually does what most haunted house movie families won’t; they get the fuck out. If face-eating paintings don’t convince you to leave, nothing will.
Wouldn’t you know the ghosts follow them? It becomes a very predictable scenario with them looking into the past of the family and the paintings and discovering a paranormal past in the bloodline. It’s a decent plot for a ghost movie, but overall it’s nothing new, so go into it if you’re looking for a comfort ghost movie, not if you’re hoping for something that will blow your mind. And the denouement is melodramatic, supernatural sap. Not really my thing.
CANDLEWOOD (2025)
The highlights of this movie for me were the fall foliage and the dad, who is kind of cute. I wouldn’t mind jumping in the leaves with him.
The opening of bloody dead people on a lake shore was intriguing enough. Then we meet a blended family that moves into a lake house.
They immediately begin encountering one strange neighbor after another and experiencing delusions of apparitions. They learn a legend of a mixed-race couple that died for love in the lake.
And then the delusions just keep coming, all in that cheap, fuzzy, unfocused visual style of early 2000s direct-to-DVD movies. The family starts to turn on one another, and the weirdness of the neighbors intensifies.
There’s really not much more to it than that. The film ends with a massacre by the lake, just as it began, and then we get a whole monologue from one of the neighbors about how the locals protect their past from outsiders. There’s not much here to hold the plot together.
