Modern horror time wasters

You know that feeling when you get to the end of a horror film and think, “I could have watched something so much better if I hadn’t given this one a chance and seen it through to the end”? Here’s a bunch of them.

ADAM & EVIL (2004)

Nothing religious here despite the title’s play on words. Right after high school graduation, Adam and his friends head into the woods for a weekend of camping. Two dirt bags in a van follow them, clearly out for some sort of revenge—and waving a red herring flag. The local sheriff near the camp seems nice enough, but his wife is horny so she sneaks into Adam’s camp to fuck one of the boys. And then the murders begin. The killer wears a hooded raincoat and relies on various weapons you can find in a shed or garage.

Despite plenty of tried-and-true slasher clichés, including a campfire legend, tons of teens having sex, and an “I know what you did last summer” backstory, this slasher is a fucking mess. Everyone spends the movie running around the woods with flashlights; it’s all chaos and no scares or atmosphere. And you won’t see the big twist coming because it was clearly pulled out of someone’s ass and stinks bad. Cute shirtless guys can’t save this one.

MOTHER’S DAY MASSACRE (2007)

I can’t even…I don’t…wait…what? I believe that the person who wrote the synopsis for this film doesn’t even quite understood what the fuck is going on. It begins as a wacky, nonsensical grindhouse exploitation flick loaded with a crazed killer mom, an abortion, and an abusive, dog-napping dad who partners with a psychiatrist to sexually assault women. Then his son and a bunch of his friends head to a deserted town that is supposedly loaded with marijuana plants and we get a backwoods slasher complete with two psycho hillbillies. Some of the kids get away, return home, and pretend nothing ever happened. But the killer mom from the beginning comes on the scene with her two psycho hillbilly sons to get revenge on their father. The stuff that’s attempting to be tasteless and offensive doesn’t even succeed here.

BTW: This isn’t a Mother’s Day holiday movie despite the title.

DON’T LOOK UP (2009)

Eli Roth’s name headlines the cast here (along with E.T.’s Henry Thomas). Eli appears in the film for less than two minutes and has barely any lines. But he does don his Inglorious Basterds mustache one more time to play a director in 1928 who is making a film based on a true story about a gypsy devil. He never finishes the movie because apparently she comes and puts and end to filming.

In the modern day, a young director with a psychic connection to ghosts wants to finish that film. The cast and crew get to the shooting location, which looks like a big warehouse, and shit starts to happen immediately. People see things, crap doesn’t work, the lights go out, people are attacked by bees, a guy gets electrocuted in the eyes, and one of the guys on the crew loses his shit and attacks people with a knife.

But the real threat is the ghost, who appears regularly…as a dead ringer for The Grudge eye. The eye even appears on a TV screen at one point and a bee crawls from the celluloid and flies out into the real world in true The Ring style. But the ghost does looks pretty cool at the very end of the movie when she forms out of CGI bees.

There are also a bunch of gory flashbacks of the director seeing the torture and murder that went on decades ago, complete with ghosts passing right through him. And he experiences one more final ghostly twist, but by then you don’t care and realize this is a movie you would skip if it showed up on the SyFy Network.

HIGH LANE (2009)

Imagine if one of the Wrong Turn films was Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger for forty-five minutes and then for the last half of the film, consisted of one non-deformed hillbilly chasing a bunch of mountain climbers around and you’ve got this borefest.

Even the worst Wrong Turn sequel is at least cheesy fun. This is dull, dull, dull. On the bright side, Raphaël Lenglet is a cutie. Hopefully, he’ll be in an entertaining horror flick someday.

RESURRECTION COUNTY (2008)

Horror hottie Adam Huss (The Cemetery, Wrestlemaniac), Dayton Knoll (Madison County, Blood Ranch, The Backlot Murders, Devil’s Highway), and their ladies head into the woods to do some camping. It doesn’t take long to have several run-ins with the local rednecks, including a naked guy with a gun—which totally gives me mixed emotions.

Things escalate really fast into generic “suburbanites vs. backwoods religious freaks” torture porn. And of course, there’s no shortage of ass-rape panic. First, during a stop at a convenience store, everyone teases Adam Huss because the clerk cruises him. Later, Adam is bent over a table…and screams way more at the sight of the hillbilly’s dick than the sight of his blowtorch. WTF?

And naturally, these butt-fucking hillbillies gather together in their Sunday best and preach vehemently against Sodom and Gomorrah. Suck my dick, you queer haters, because I’ve heard and seen it all before.