Once again I’m kicking myself for doing a marathon of Netflix horror movies. So it’s time for you to either suffer the way I did, or perhaps find one that sounds right up your alley.
THE TRIP (2021)
I don’t know. I guess this is a home invasion/almost gay rape-revenge flick. It’s nearly two hours long and that’s just one of the reasons it’s so not my thing.
A straight couple heads to a house in the woods, neither partner realizing the other partner has sinister plans for them.
While they’re both in the middle of solving their relationship problems in all the wrong ways, they get another unexpected surprise—three escaped psychos are hiding out in the house.
After a long scene of the male partner under the threat of being raped by one of the psychos, who’s gay (landing this on the does the gay guy die? page), the captured couple starts to fight back.
There’s loads of over-the-top violence, shit humor, the gay guy plucking a bullet out of another psycho’s ass, the type of out of sequence narration made famous by Taranatino films, and…well, that’s about it.
If you’re into all that, you should have a blast with this one. A bit of a slow start, but after about 25 minutes it’s a wild ride.
MALEVOLENT (2018)
Why do I keep doing this to myself and watching these ghost hunter movies?
This isn’t a found footage movie, but that doesn’t help. It takes place in the 1980s and even has a club scene featuring the dance hit “IOU” by Freeez, but that doesn’t help. Unless you just adore ghost hunter movies, there’s so much more you could do with this 90 minutes.
A brother and sister team does scam ghost hunts. But on their latest case the sister hears voices and is afraid she’s going nuts like her deceased mom did before committing suicide.
A woman asks them to chase away screaming girl ghosts in her home.
The home where she had fifteen foster girls. The home where simple research turns up the fact that her son was believed to have killed them all after sewing their mouths shut.
The story arc is obvious, the scares are lacking (unless little girl ghosts standing in the background still scare you). This movie simply did nothing for me.
THE SEVENTH DAY (2021)
This film almost had me, and it offers a couple of promising premises, but in the end the execution is just so generic it falls quite flat.
It begins with horror veteran Keith David as a priest doing an exorcism on a little kid with a rookie priest by his side.
We then meet the rookie years later, played by Guy Pearce, and he is now an unconventional mentor to another rookie exorcist on his first day. They go to perform an exorcism on a homeless person under on overpass, and this felt like it was going to be a different kind of buddy exorcist movie.
But that possibility fades fast.
The rookie becomes the focus as he takes on a case of a young boy who axed his family to death and is believed to be possessed and in need of an exorcism. The possession and exorcism elements are sooooo run-of-the-mill here, and even though there’s a good twist as to what the real problem is, it simply doesn’t manage to pack the punch it should. There is, however, some priest on priest action…
