This one’s going to be short, because nothing in this eclectic mix did it for me.
SILENT HOUSE (2011)
This remake of a Spanish language film is recognized for being shot in a single take that follows every move of the main character.
When a young woman returns to her childhood home with her dad and uncle to clean it up for sale, there’s a blackout, things start going bump in the night, her dad and uncle disappear, and the ghosts come out to play. Every scene is predominantly very dark with a lot of shaky cam (due to a cameraman chasing the chick around for a single shot movie, I imagine), and after several “attacks” by ghosts that never actually touch the chick, any sense of dread is gone.
I was never particularly chilled to the bone watching this fairly routine, modern haunted house movie with its pitch black house, flashlights, candles, camera flashes, and a whole lot of apparitions jumping out at the camera. I did, however, like the concept and the reveal at the end of what’s really haunting her was a good payoff.
SCAR TISSUE (2013)
Scar Tissue opens with a gruesome scene of cops raiding a lair filled with mutilated corpses then blasting away some sort of psycho doctor. Got my attention.
After that, it just gets weird. A cute young guy goes partying and finds one of his female friend’s mutilated in a bathroom. Meanwhile, there’s this cop who has been put on leave because she’s rebellious, which makes sense, since she looks like a high school punk rocker, complete with bleach blonde hair with pink highlights. The two ridiculously begin working together to figure out if the psycho from the beginning of the movie is actually not dead and possibly targeting the guy.
The film has a gritty feel and there are plenty of gruesome visuals as the pair crashes crime scenes, including a few gore moments, like an eye falling onto the kid’s foot, and a girl waiting for a dick to pop through a glory hole but getting a severed hand instead. However, this is more of mystery than a horror film—nothing particularly scary here. And things really fall apart at the end during a convoluted, excessively long, dialogue heavy confrontation with the killer.
DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS (2014)
Here’s evidence that perhaps a white gay guy shouldn’t be watching a black movie with Jesus in the title.
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, despite being about a man cursed with a lust for sucking blood, is not really a horror movie. Sure, there are a couple of visually gross shots of some of the women he kills (including one whose nipples appear to be bitten off), but this film is more like a weird combination of retro 70s blaxploitation and dramatic romance! WTF?
An anthropologist is cursed by an ancient dagger he acquired and starts hooking up with women for nourishment. Then he begins a love relationship with the wife of a dead colleague. She struggles to accept what he is, he changes her to make it easier to understand, she has lesbian sex with one of his ex-girlfriend’s, and things end tragically. There’s also plenty of horrible hip hop and bad 70s-inspired movie music, plus a long, fast-forward worthy musical performance at a church. Really, this film just became background noise for me.
