Do doggie companions make survival horror more fun?

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Daniel

As I continue my endeavor to replay all my horror games I haven’t covered on Boys, Bears & Scares yet, I take on Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose, two games in which the protagonist is joined on her horror journey by a doggy friend.

HAUNTING GROUND

Following on the heels of my replay of Clock Tower 3, it’s another run and scream experience with Haunting Ground. You play a young woman trapped in a castle and pursued by a variety of baddies. You can run, you can hide, you can slow them down with some defensive items that hurt them momentarily, and you can even sic your dog friend on them, but you can’t fight them until boss battles. Sigh. You also have to manage your health, your panic meter, and the health of your dog Hewie. Double sigh.

If you examine things like gory messes around the castle, you panic a little. When it escalates, you become disoriented, your visibility is hindered, you trip, fall, and crash into things, and eventually the screen goes wonky. Provided you can get away from the threat in that state (you can’t), panic restores slowly over time, or you can take healing items to fix it. There are also health items for when you take damage, and health for Hewie as well. As you progress in the game, you’ll find different choker necklaces you can wear that help lessen the effects of dangerous stimuli on your health and panic levels as well.

Of course for me there’s a crucial element of the game: saves. You save at grandfather clocks, but you can’t save while you’re being chased by an enemy. There are also sinks and fountains where you can fully restore your health…as long as you’re not being chased.

Just like Clock Tower 3, there are hiding spots, and they only help so much. If you hide in the same spot too many times, the enemies find you. I did notice in this game however that if you really run around enough and create significant distant between yourself and the stalker, the stalker eventually disappears for a while. As if run and scream games aren’t already annoying enough, this one tosses in essentially harmless enemies that serve mostly to just draw attention to your location so the stalker can find you. Argh.

Next comes the item collecting. There are a variety of ways to get items. Some are just sparkling in the open for you to find. Others are in red vases you can kick to break. And still other items can be made at machines you insert plates into and then type words on. As usual, you’d have no idea what words to type to make crucial items you need to move ahead in the game if you don’t use a walkthrough.

As for Hewie, you find him tied to a tree early on in the game. He becomes your friend, but you do have to train him with commands mapped to the right thumbstick such as, “good boy”, “stay”, “go”, and the mean one, “No!” I tried to use that as little as possible, because I can’t be mean to dogs. Unfortunately, while you can kick vases and even enemies, if you accidentally kick Hewie (he tends to circle and get in the way a lot), he will lose a little trust in you. Do it too much and he will attack you! I’m proud to say Hewie never attacked me. He does seem to learn commands quickly, and you can also feed him jerky you find as health and as treats, but as much as he listens, he seems to flip you the finger when you really need him to listen to commands during puzzle solving. For instance, there’s segment that requires you to step on a series of discs on the floor to light them up in a certain order. You get Hewie to go to them, tell him to stay, and then as you’re running to the next lit disc, Hewie decides he just doesn’t want to stay anymore and you have to start the whole puzzle over again. NUMEROUS TIMES. I swear the game programmers do this shit just to fuck with us.

Also of note is that you can accidentally “lose” Hewie. If he falls behind and you forget to keep calling him to stick with you, he might end up on the other side of a reconfigured path you’ve taken, and you have to circle back to find him. Sometimes it can take an infuriating amount of time to actually find him considering walls and doors have shifted from their original positions, which heightens the chances that the stalker will come after you again because you’re taking too long to get anything done. Infuriating.

As for the enemies, there’s a new one in each chapter (which eventually ends in a boss battle). And just as you can’t heal or save while being chased, you can’t do anything involving your mission objective. So you end up running in circles, forgetting where you left off, try to shake the stalker, and then try to find your way back to where you were.

The first stalker is a big bald goon. The next stalker is a relentless bitch that slashes at you viciously. The third stalker has a damn gun and shoots at you and Hewie. It’s like trying to go out in public in the United States. The fourth stalker begins as a decrepit old man that crawls along the ground really fast. In the second part of his chapter he becomes young and studly with the ability to teleport.

There are a variety of frustrating elements in between trying to stay away from stalkers:

  • There’s a nightmarish hall with a perspective from in front of you and two dark areas on the floor. You have to tell Hewie to go and then follow him as closely as possible along the blackness on a path apparently only he can see. There’s a save before, but this leads to a boss battle, and then you have to cross back over it after the boss battle! WTF?

  • You’ll never know it if you don’t fallow a walkthrough, but after the first chapter there are powerful steel boots you can find for kicking enemies. However, they are in a bathroom you must visit before you move on to the next section and before the new stalker starts coming for you, because there’s no going back after that.

  • There’s a part where you have to use a giant golem figure (sort of like Bigfoot) to walk around and put out fires through a maze of tunnels so you can pass through them to new doorways. The catch is you have to type left-right commands on plates…and you’ll need enough of them to do it all. And every time you insert a plate in the golem, you have to watch the video of him walking down the tunnels all over again. The only upside is you can press a run button to get him to do it faster. Do video game programmers not realize there are ways to just make him do it fast without you having to press a button?

 

  • One of the boss battles has you getting Hewie to attack the enemy while you push blocks through tracks in the floor—but the camera angles suck, and Hewie and the boss will fight right in your way as you try to get to the blocks.

  • The final stalker–the crawling old man who turns into a supernatural hunk? His chapter is a multiple “final boss” fight. The first time is pretty easy—you just have to lure the old man onto a conveyor belt, get Hewie to attack him so he stays on it, then quickly run across the room and kick a machine two times to get it to turn on. After you do some more exploring and collecting, which thankfully involves quite a few save clocks in the area, the second fight with the young version of the stalker is annoying. However, there are multiple ways to kill him, including turning on a fan to blow him into a lava pit, getting him to run over fire spots on the floor, having Hewie repeatedly attack him from behind, and also using your own throwing weapons if you’ve saved them up and not used them on other enemies throughout the course of the game.

  • finally, the third time you encounter the last boss is a hot mess. Literally. It’s the dude totally on fire and chasing you with a one-hit kill situation. At the same time, you have to listen to sound cues to know when to crouch to avoid being rocked by an earthquake tremor, which will both eat way at your health and slow you down. During this chase you also have to get Hewie to open a door to move on and then button mash to push away a statue that’s falling on you. This is where you’re most likely to get killed, because the hot lava dude is right on your tail at this point. Sigh. Good news is it only took me three tries to get it.

RULE OF ROSE

The plot of this game goes so deep that the clumsy game mechanics get in the way of appreciating the story that is unfolding. The combat in particular is so bad I would highly recommend using a Codebreaker if you want to smoothly experience the tale that unfolds without having to struggle through and replay endless battles without enough health items to stand a chance of surviving.

This is a horror metaphor for the darkest avenues of childhood—loneliness, sadness, bullying, mental and emotional trauma that causes violent behavior before a sense of morals has a chance to develop, childhood terrors and coping mechanisms, and most disturbing of all, child abuse of all sorts. Appropriately, you play a young, frightened girl dumped at a bus station at night on a deserted road. Before long, you arrive at an ominous orphanage.

This isn’t tank control horror survival. You move the character by pushing in the direction you want to go, and as usual, this controller schematic can lead you into spinning in circles because you keep changing course accidentally during screen changes. Passing through doors is slow going, but the name of the room you are entering is presented as a title card while you wait for the load. So it would be nice if the map actually featured the names of the locations, but it’s just a big, blank, useless drawing.

The game definitely captures a sense of isolation, for there is virtually no audible dialogue. The ambience is created through irritating old time melodies and textual subtitles, sort of like watching a silent film. This makes it feel very lonely, but also kills the creep factor because everything talks to you…including inanimate objects. Not so spooky when they’re not actually speaking. There are also lots of pauses as the game title cards describe to you what’s going on, sort of like reading a storybook, which plays a big role in the fairy tale freakishness of the game.

Both tragic and terrifying, the highlight here is the creepy laughs that follow you as you travel and chase after fleeing children in shadowy corridors. You’ll also just run into children playing in areas where you can talk to them to get a little more fluff from the story (all as subtitles). While plenty of the children are harmless, there are also evil children that practically stepped right out of the corn. They sometimes wear bags on their heads, and they torture animals. Serious warning. There’s a lot of gruesome animal torture.

The most frightening “children” are the deformed ones that attack you, as well as ones that have rat, pig, and goat heads. Eek! You find sharp weapons to attack them, but the aiming is really wonky. You have to constantly readjust your body position. The goal is to score the steel pipe, which has the longest range and can take down multiple enemies with one swing. They will totally swarm you, at which point it’s just better to run by them. Good luck getting around them in narrow spaces as they leap on you and you have to shake them off by jiggling the thumbstick.

A bucket on sticks serves as the save point, and there are enough of them around to be comforting. You can also talk to the bucket on sticks to get clues on how to proceed. Weird thing is there are certain points in the game where you’ll just be asked if you want to save, and it’s always right before you wake up in a save room with a bucket on sticks.

Also in the save rooms are rubbish bins that serve as item boxes. The cool thing about this game is that you can simply “drop” an item anywhere and it will go into the bin. It’s a feature you need, because juggling inventory and knowing what you can drop into the rubbish bin is hard to figure out. You quickly fill up inventory and then can’t pick up other items. The game doesn’t even tell you what you’re trying to pick up…it just tells you to drop something first, so you won’t find out what the object is until you deal with the conundrum of relinquishing your hold on an item you might need. Important to note is that you will pick up storybooks along the way, but you don’t actually have to keep them in inventory—one slot is taken up by “files”…and all the storybooks are in there, too. Kind of ridiculous—they should all just go into a separate files tab like most games so you don’t have to manually store them.

Of course, the most important feature of the game is your dog companion Brown—who, despite his name, looks like a golden retriever (he knows I’m talking about him). You find him all tied and bound and hanging upside down. Fucked up, especially because you can’t save him immediately. You have to leave him there and go find scissors to cut him down.

Unlike Hewie in Haunting Ground, the good news is: a) there’s no friendly fire, so you can’t accidentally hurt Brown while fighting enemies, and b) you don’t have to train Brown, and the interactions are streamlined. “Go”, “stay”, and “come” are the basics, and you can love on him a little if he’s close. The most crucial role he plays is in finding items, which is a little weird but essential to playing the game. You have to select “find” on an object in inventory then tell Brown to “go”. You have to then follow him as he sniffs out a different object. You must do this constantly to progress. Be warned. If you’re in a battle with those little devil’s spawn while in the midst of tracking an item and you want Brown to attack them (which is actually just barking to temporarily distract them), you have to go into inventory and turn off the find request temporarily. Ugh.

You will occasionally encounter bosses. The horrible, clunky combat control, which often has you swinging and completely missing even though you’re right next to the enemy, makes them a chore that could leave you wanting to quit.

The first boss is kind of lame. He’s an old geek in a sort of catcher’s mask. But it’s very easy to get caught up in a loop of him hitting you. You must wait for his long swing and hit him from behind. In this and every boss battle, make sure to keep Brown out of the fight or you might have to heal him too—call him off to the side and tell him to stay. What’s the purpose of having a dog that can go vicious for you if you can’t have him tear into enemies?

Another section has no dedicate boss, but there are these weird cone shaped creatures with duck bills that just peck the fuck out of you. There are two ways to encounter them. First there’s a section of hallways and rooms, and there’s one particular room you need to find. The map is useless, and this is one instance when there’s nothing to let Brown find to get you there. If you go into any room other than that specific room, you get locked in and encounter a duck bill you have to fight in a cramped space, and there is nowhere to have Brown stay to be safe, so chances are he is going to die. The next time you meet duck bills, there are a swarm of them! You need to run past them with Brown in order to get an item you need on the other side of them…then run back through them again. Ugh.

The next boss is a damn mermaid that dangles from a rope and drops repeatedly from the ceiling, screaming her head off and spitting acid at you that you’re supposed to avoid. It also leaves puddles on the floor that you get stuck in temporarily. Fighting her takes forever, but you can leave Brown in one corner where he mostly stays safe.

There’s then a horrible section that requires you to go fight two of each kind of animal child to open the next door…so you have to run around the house looking for them while dodging regular deformed children enemies. One of the animal kids you have to kill is in a room with a bunch of other animal kids, so you have to fight all of them just to clear the room so you can actually figure out which one is the one you need to kill.

The final boss is an enslaved hulk of a man in his undies who crawls around and jumps you. You basically have to get behind him and hit him in the ass.

You won’t realize it, but when you fight him again immediately after, you’re given a gun. But to get the good ending, you’re not supposed to shoot him…you’re supposed to use the gun from your inventory when he kneels, which he does pretty soon…something you’d never know without using a walkthru.

There are plenty of instances when you will be left clueless. For instance, at one point you have to check a wardrobe closet three times to make the teddy bear on top fall off. You would never know to do this without a walkthrough, and it’s crucial because it triggers a scene that gets you out of a locked room. After doing that, you actually have to wait for someone to arrive to let you out! It takes so long you would think the game glitched without a walkthru to warn you that the wait is not short. During another mission that has you locating a power room to turn the lights back on while dodging pig men left and right, the find command suddenly isn’t totally accurate and there are times you should ignore where Brown wants to go and go another way! How would you ever know this without a walktrhu?

Just as the game is nearing the end, the programmers found an obnoxious way to extend the play time. It’s a tedious segment with annoying, whimsical music playing on an old record while you go from room to room trying to talk to children that ignore you and then throw notes at you.

Also important to point out is that the game is quite glitchy. For example, you walk through the dog, you get stuck on baddies while trying to run around them when they attack you, and if they fall to the ground and you run into them, you push them across the floor!

And finally, as melancholy and depressing as the themes are in this game, for me the most emotional aspect is how the dog is used and what he represents. For dog lovers, this game will have a much bigger impact than Haunting Ground.

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There’s more to horror than just white people…

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Daniel

My latest movie marathon included movies that feature Black main characters and racial themes.

DON’T LOOK BACK (2020)

Jeffrey Reddick, the openly gay writer of the original Final Destination, writes and directs this throwback to the supernatural slashers from the same early 2000s era.

Reminiscent of the classic Ray Bradbury story “The Crowd”, this is a modern look at the obsession with spectating as horrible situations take place in public rather than intervening to perhaps save a life.

In this case, a young Black woman is one of several people that watch as a man is beaten to death in a park.

She suffers from macabre hallucinations as guilt eats away at her for not helping the victim of the park crime.

Soon, she starts seeing a raven right before others who were at the park that day die. I think this is where the film is lacking. There aren’t many death scenes, and they aren’t particularly inventive or memorable—surprising when you consider the creator is responsible for a franchise that’s all about its wild death scenes. There is, however, a scene in which the main girl goes searching for someone crying for help that I’m convinced is a nod to Tina’s opening scene in the original Elm Street, right down to lattice fencing in the background.

As with other films of this sort, the plot points don’t stray far from the template—the main girl is the only one who believes something supernatural is going on, and as she tries to intervene before each murder the investigation inevitably points to her being a prime suspect. It’s definitely familiar territory, making this a retro comfort food horror flick.

For me, the absolute highlight is the ending, which brings to mind the zinger conclusions of classic horror anthology shows.

TRINKET BOX (2023)

You know things aren’t going well when a movie has a dream scare scene and a dream scare scene within a dream scare scene. Or when a movie called Trinket Box is instead entirely based around a necklace, not the trinket box it came in.

A long opening sequence tells the tale of older days, when a young Black man is chased down by a white family for sleeping with their daughter. This is after the daughter talks to him about witches…a topic that is flirted with but never fully explored.

In the present day, an interracial couple moves into a new home. The absolute best part of this film is when an old white neighbor comes knocking to check on the wife because she saw “a dark man” leaving the premises. When the husband comes home, he warns the wife not to trust the old lady because she’s most likely racist…and the wife tells him he’s being paranoid! It’s an ideal example of how even white people married to Black people can look right through racism as if it’s not there.

Meanwhile, the old neighbor, who gives the wife the trinket box with the necklace in it, seems very witchy, but that idea simply isn’t expanded on enough to deliver much in the way of thrills. Other than the dream sequences, this turns almost exclusively into a drama about the tensions between the couple. She eventually gets pregnant, and I can’t believe how much time in this already too long movie is spent on their round of pregnancy announcements.

There’s only one other brief encounter with the neighbor, a nudity-free sex scene that is literally set to bow-chicka-wow-wow music, a lot of walking around in way too dark settings, and faux scares thanks to excessive orchestral stingers.

The husband does begin to suspect the wife acts differently whenever she’s wearing the necklace. With about fifteen minutes to go, she basically goes Linda Blair very briefly. The never-ending finale (which continues after the credits) does connect the main plot to the opening scene, but the connection makes this some sort of ridiculous plot to systematically wipe out interracial couples…partially through the occult.

GOATMAN (2023)

The film and sound quality fluctuate constantly in this goofy, low budget backwoods flick, making it clear what you’re in for. As corny and bad as it is, there’s a slight sense of humor here that made me laugh several times. The big flaw is that there’s not enough of the hokey goatman.

A white reporter, her Black cameraman, and a small crew head into the woods with a tour guide to investigate a bunch of disappearances near a bridge with an infamous past—in the early 1900s a Black goat herder was killed there by a clan of whites.

The local rednecks that are interviewed tell tales of The Goatman, which is believed to roam the forest and kill people, and some of the locals gave me a giggle.

Disconnected flashbacks show three teens doing a séance with a Ouija board on the bridge and then being killed by Goatman. We needed so much more of this action.

Instead, after a whole lot of talk between main characters, they are abducted by a bunch of hillbillies!

The bulk of the “horror” ends up being the hillbillies tormenting them while they are tied up, and then killing them one by one.

I kept wishing Goatman would show up to save the news crew from the hillbillies. That doesn’t happen until 70 minutes in, and it’s once again way too little Goatman action.

The tongue-in-cheek tone of the film is highlighted by a funny faux commercial, as well as a trailer promoting the director’s other film Amityville Cult.

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It came from a 90s camcorder

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Daniel

I don’t know why I put myself through this, but I simply had to watch these 3 low budget films from the 90s that all look like they were shot on a handheld VHS camera.

L.A. AIDS JABBER (1994)

This movie was released over a decade after the AIDS epidemic first gained prominence around the world, yet it is totally based on a major AIDS panic urban legend that everyone heard about back then…a crazy guy running around jabbing people with a syringe full of AIDS-tainted blood. It has also been retitled to sound more exploitative and offensive; the original title was simply Jabber.

Amazingly, there are absolutely no derogatory references to gay men or attacks aimed at the queer community in this film, so kudos to the creators for that. Our main guy Jeff is a straight dude who finds out from his doctor that he is HIV positive. This is where the film shows its ignorance, mostly going directly to “I have AIDS and I’m going to die” to serve the urgency of the killer’s motivation rather than exploring the idea of being HIV positive.

However, while this film is considered a horror movie with a slasher template, it’s really not, because the dude targets those he feels have wronged him by just jabbing them with his needle and then leaving. It’s not as if they’re going to die on the spot.

In an effort to capture the sleazy feel of indie movies from the early 80s, we get plenty of shots of seedy city streets lined with porn businesses, and our jabber goes after the likes of a prostitute and a psychic, but there’s no nudity, no gore, and no suspense.

In fact, the majority of the film focuses on the detectives on the case, and it’s quite boring. When they finally track down the jabber, the “shocker” twist makes this feel like it should have been a short episode of The Hitcher or Tales from the Crypt rather than a full-length feature.

THE NECRO FILES (1997)

This one makes up for all the exploitation Jabber lacked, beginning with hairy pussy, tits, and ass in the shower.

A masked psycho breaks in, rapes, stabs, and kills the woman showering and then cuts off her nipple and eats it.

Then shit gets crazy…

The cops shoot the psycho, he’s buried, a satanic cult resurrects home by sacrificing a baby (an obvious doll) and pissing on his grave. Like, we actually get a shot of urine streaming from a wiener.

The psycho rises from the grave as a corpse and starts hunting down, raping, and killing people as they’re involved in skanky sex, from a BDSM couple to a woman fucking a blowup doll with a dildo.

Meanwhile, the dead baby is also somehow resurrected and flies around talking like a chipmunk from outer space. The best part is when it hunts down to funny rednecks that regret having participated in the satanic cult.

It’s pure nasty absurdity made for a very particular audience. You know who you are.

I’m not saying that’s who I am, but with the other options in this trio, The Necro Files was definitely the most satisfying selection in this triple feature.

THE HIDDEN (1993)

This Australian film runs 77 minutes long, but it can’t come up with any horror energy to keep it going.

After a dude doing a drug deal in a sewer tunnel is attacked and killed by infrared monster POV, his brother becomes determined to find out who killed him.

His hunt to uncover the truth consists mostly of talk and bad dreams. That’s all you get until the last few minutes, when the brother and his friends set a booby trap to lure the monster out of the tunnel…with cocaine.

There are shirtless guys, a lot more infrared POV, and fleeting shots of what basically looks like a guy in a gorilla or Bigfoot costume, and that’s all the horror this snoozer has to offer due to the non-existent budget. Fun concept though.

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I saw it on cable during the summer of 2023

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Daniel

I decided to tap into movies floating around Showtime and Starz that I hadn’t seen yet, which led me to this trio.

V FOR VENGEANCE (2022)

This is the kind of humorous action vampire movie that would have found a home on SyFy back in the day, and it’s the perfect type of popcorn movie to watch with my horror-lite husband.

After a cute, sexy vampire girl shows her true colors by hitching rides with a couple of redneck bears to feed on, she reconnects with her estranged vampire sister. Despite bickering, they decide they must take down the clan of bad vamps that killed their parents and rescue their missing sister.

Along the way, they become allies with a few vampire hunters, including a sexy one they can’t resist.

There are some playful twists and turns leading up to the sisters infiltrating the lair of the vampire clan to destroy its leader.

The cast is pretty and charming, the humor is cute and funny, and the fight scenes are a load of fun. This is a low budget indie I could easily watch over and over.

HUMAN RESOURCES (2022)

Why, why, why did the creators of this film opt to make it 110 minutes long? Just look at reviews on IMDb and you’ll see most of them saying they couldn’t get through half the movie.

Well, I stuck it out, and this movie did start to bore me to tears…until the last 25 minutes, when it at last delivers on the horror and throws in an unexpected, tonal shift that is fun but definitely jarring.

A dude desperate for work takes a job at a very creepy hardware store with dark and isolate aisles, militant managers that watch workers like hawks, and zones that are off limits. There’s even a zombie-like, regular customer. Eek!

Our main guy notices almost immediately that things are off, learns the previous employee disappeared mysteriously, and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to him and what’s behind a locked door in back.

Unfortunately, that plot simply can’t sustain itself for nearly an hour and a half. The main dude always looks terrified and is constantly almost getting caught snooping around, yet nothing ever comes of any of the building suspense moments. The repetition just causes the film to start dying a slow death.

And then comes that final act. It’s like this movie did that Tantric cum control trick and finally let it all explode at once. We find out what’s behind that door, there’s suddenly inhuman madness, and the main guy finds his balls and breaks out his fighting moves to a rockin’ track (the out of place tonal shift moment).

I would love to recommend this movie for the finale, but you just have to understand that it will try your patience before you get there.

THE LONELIEST BOY IN THE WORLD (2022)

The director of L.A. Slasher offers up a zombie message movie that brings to mind the film Fido…with less zombie action. Don’t let the cartoonish, surreal sets and campy tone fool you…this film labeled a zomcom fantasy on imdb isn’t funny. It’s actually sad.

The lead is Max Hardwood, who played the lead in the queer film Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. And while this film is a metaphor for family, friends, and loneliness, his performance as a young man who was in a psychiatric  institution, who was abandoned by his father, and whose mother recently died in a freak accident, leaving him alone to live in her pink-lit house, can just as easily be read as a metaphor for the isolation some young queer people feel when they have no social and familial support.

Max is told by his social workers that in order to live alone, he needs to make friends to prove he’s a normal member of society. Problem is that everyone bullies him.

Soooooo…he digs up the body of a young man who recently died and brings him home to be his friend. There’s definitely a queer edge to this short-lived relationship (so to speak), because Max decides to go back to the cemetery and dig up a whole family worth of corpses. He even brings home a dog he runs over while leaving the cemetery. As a result, I felt like Max doesn’t get enough time to bond with any of them individually.

Every one of them comes back as a zombie and they all live a happy life together. We can assume they’re not really alive and that Max just needs companionship, because there’s no explanation for the zombie transformations—Max just wakes up and there they are. However, that begs the question, why doesn’t he imagine them coming back to life as whole people and not rotting corpses?

There’s not much of a story arc to keep any momentum going beyond Max living with corpses and occasionally making sure they’re not discovered by outsiders. The whole film feels like a colorfully tragic peek at a really lonely kid who can’t come to terms with reality. Even a sequence on Halloween didn’t draw me into this world. And the ending, while seeming to suggest that Max finds a positive escape from the psychological prison he’s created, is just as sad and depressing to me as the whole movie.

There is, at least, a good soundtrack, including “We Close Our Eyes” by Go West, Max Hardwood covering the Go West hit “King of Wishful Thinking”, an instrumental of “Can’t Smile Without You” used as a theme song, Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing” during a montage of Max making his family comfy, and “Ghostbusters” for the Halloween sequence.

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Zombie horror caught live on body cams

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Daniel

Found footage style zombie film Live Escape and its sequel Live Survivor are best watched in a single sitting as one long movie, because the second film picks up where the first left off, and in my opinion is actually the better of the two.

LIVE ESCAPE (2022)

This little indie feels like a simplified take on the Quarantine vibe, and I had fun with it. If I have one complaint, it’s that the film should have been trimmed down from 90 minutes to 75 or 80 minutes. The contained setting and limited number of characters lead to a lot of repetitive action to fill the time.

We follow two cops on their body cams as they respond to a call about a situation at a homeless shelter. Before long they’re having run-ins with infected people in the maze-like building.

The film stars the writer/director Joe Lujan and cutie Bryant Smith, who looks hot in a police uniform and rox a sexy mustache like nobody’s business. They become trapped in the shelter and are chased and terrorized by infected people that keep popping up in the beams of their flashlights. EEK!

Other than a few survivors they stumble upon briefly, the cops are the only two living characters in the film, so there’s a whole lot of running around in circles in the same locations since they can’t get out of the building, which is only so big.

Also noticeable is that perhaps some of the dialogue was ad-libbed, because the F bomb is excessively inserted into sentences to the point of distraction.

Despite that, the limited camera view throughout the dark hallways creates atmosphere and tension. Shaky cam, blurring, and distorted focus add to the chaotic feel, and there are even some nods to first-person shooter video games, plus what to me feels like an homage to the settings from the first Resident Evil video game.

Of course it’s all about the horror action, so don’t be looking for any new or unique plot—it’s as common as it gets and very reminiscent of the plots of zombie video games. While the final frame can and probably will be read as final, through the wonders of movie magic, the cops live to see another day…

LIVE SURVIVAL (2023)

The sequel begins with an origins opener that shows the infection spreading to scientists experimenting in a lab…

Next, we meet a guy who is pulled over by the two cops from the first movie, after which he and his female companion are attacked by zombies. For reasons I don’t understand, this sequence is done found footage style, but it’s a damn good scene. Anyway, they escape into the same building the cops did, and it’s more intense and scary than anything in the first movie.

Pretty soon, the couple encounters the cops, who end up right back where they started. Oddly, the cops don’t immediately realize that they narrowly escaped a feeding frenzy in the final frame of the first film by running right back into the same building. The good news is that Bryant Smith is all disheveled from running away from zombies, and he looks like he just had really sweaty sex.

After settling in, the group splits up. The cops search a lab area, while the couple tries to stay put in what looks like the halls and rooms of the Resident Evil mansion.

The branching focus on two sets of characters makes this sequel faster-paced and less repetitive, and the zombie scenes are thrilling and exciting. There are even some creepy, new mutations.

And as much as the film seems to end with the survivors being swarmed, which is exactly how the first film ended, I have a feeling that movie magic might lead to a third installment. If there is one, I’ll totally be watching.

 

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TUBI TERRORS: water zombies, a backwoods cult, and a supernatural slasher

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Daniel

My longest watchlist these days is on Tubi, which has a vast selection of the kind of indie horror I love to wade through. That doesn’t mean I actually love every movie, so let’s find out if my latest marathon offered up anything worthwhile.

ESCAPE TO THE COVE (2021)

This “zombie” film is written and directed by the star.

There’s a cool premise here, but this 100-minute movie has less than ten zombies—or more like infected in this case, because there’s definitely a COVID-esque virus angle (one character even wears a mask for fear it’s airborne).

If I was understanding correctly, the idea is unique. Most of the zombies are underwater, and there are a handful of people who want to get across the water to arrive at a safe, zombie-free community.

There’s a major shortage of boats, so the limited number of characters will do whatever it takes to get their hands on one specific boat.

In actuality, the cast consists of the boat owner, a young dude who is an admitted wimp and begs to tag along for protection…and then a bunch of modern day pirates that want to commandeer the boat.

There is one totally awesome night scene that shows a zombie with glowing blue eyes in the water. It’s so creepy and effective that underwater zombies should have been exploited to make this an actual horror movie.

Instead there’s loads of dialogue, long stretches of no dialogue and no action while dramatic music plays, and even Eric Roberts in a brief cameo to give this movie “star power” cred. Sigh.

THOSE WHO CALL (2023)

If you think The Blair Witch Project was some sort of terrifying masterpiece, there’s no excuse for you to think this isn’t also. While not found footage, it involves a few people lost in the woods and occasionally running into bundles of sticks.

Only difference is that in this movie there is an actual visual danger pursuing them.

Having recently lost their father, two sisters are working through their issues with each other as they drive a desolate road in Texas.

They run into the kinds of things you’d expect in Texas—creepy white people at a rural gas station and creepy doll stick figures hanging from trees in the woods.

Eventually the girls run out of gas, get lost while trying to hike to civilization, and find a derelict house with signs of cult worship inside.

There are some eerie encounters with unsettling situations in the woods and cult members in red robes, but overall the plot isn’t very unique and the big surprise ending doesn’t pack a punch.

THE WRAITH WITHIN (2023)

Running only 76 minutes long, The Wraith Within is my kind of quick, cheap thrill.

A group of friends is heading home for a high school reunion. They’re not the nicest bunch, and when they meet up with a fellow classmate in her shop, they’re just as mean to her as they were back in the day. Conveniently, they break a box she has on display, so she makes them buy it.

When they open the box and find a teddy bear inside, weird things start to happen in the house at which they are staying.

As the friends try to track down the original owner of the teddy bear, they get murdered one by one by a witchy woman. It’s a low budget throwback to the supernatural slashers of the 00s with plenty of kills. Yay!

Of note is that there’s a very intimate moment between two male friends that seems like it’s going to result in one character coming out or telling the other guy he’s in love with him, but the witch shows up before that can happen. And finally, Michael Madsen plays the sheriff just so we get some name.

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Creatures, creeps, and ghosts

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Daniel

This trio of films was just a toss of the dice from my various streaming service watchlists. Let’s see if any of them were exciting enough to keep me occupied.

THE FEARWAY (2023)

We’ve seen this all before. It combines locked in a location horror with road rage terror and manages to fall flat in both respects.

A straight couple is heading to see the female’s sick father. They’re also having conflicted feelings about when to get married.

Then the craziness kicks in. They hit something in the road, but there’s nothing there when they get out except a patch of ice…in the desert. Minutes later, a dude in a black car starts relentlessly pursuing them.

They pull into a diner/gas station/hotel and the guy goes away. Everyone in the diner is nice…except they’re all apparently guarding some sort of gateway to death that’s behind a hotel room door. Sigh.

There’s mention of a beast behind the door, but we never get to see it. There’s an awesome reaper type guy driving the black car.

Hard to ignore the fact that this “dark man” representing the reaper is the only Black character in the whole movie. Sad thing is he’s an awesome villain that deserves more screen time in a better movie. There’s only one satisfying confrontation with him.

The rest of the movie is a just a loop of the couple trying to leave but always circling back to the diner/gas station/hotel. And the “twist” at the end is no twist. It’s been done dozens of times in movies that were all the rage a couple of decades ago.

UNWELCOME (2023)

This little creature feature comes from the director of Tormented, and it’s kind of like a mashup of Troll 2 and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

A straight couple falls victim to a home invasion in London. To get away from it all, they head to a countryside home in Ireland. They’re instructed to leave an offering of liver at the door of a small house back in the gardens…or else.

Turns out there are little goblins living in the woods beyond the little house.

This is a slow burn film that keeps you waiting for the first appearance of the goblins, which doesn’t happen until an hour in.

But once they finally arrive, it’s an entertaining and sometimes humorous battle. But it’s not exactly what you’d expect, because the real problem for the couple is a weird family they hire to fix up the house.

That’s what makes this film a refreshing take on the little critters genre—it doesn’t follow the usual template.

THE CANTERVILLE GHOST (1996)

Based on Oscar Wilde’s short story, this film was made right around the time Neve Campbell was about to make it big in the horror realm with The Craft and Scream. It’s definitely a gentle warm-up, because it’s essentially a family movie. Personally, I think it would bore kids, because it’s a romanticized ghost story.

Neve and her family come to live in Canterville Hall after her dad gets a job in England. She doesn’t want to be there, her little brothers are pranksters and get on her nerves, and…there’s a ghost.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Neve’s character here dresses exactly like Sidney in the first Scream movie…

Patrick Stewart plays the specter, and we very quickly see that he isn’t scary. He’s kind of just there, haunting the place and waiting to tie up loose ends so he can cross over.

It’s up to Neve to help him. But she wants something in return. She’s in love with a young Duke that lives next door.

Her parents think she’s lying about the ghost she sees, and so they want to send her home. She wants Stewart to help prove to them that he exists.

It’s hokey, it isn’t fun like other family ghost movies, and when Neve eventually has to travel to a “dark realm” to help release Stewart’s spirit, we don’t even go along with her! WTF?

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STREAM QUEEN: summer scares

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Daniel

It’s always fun to stay inside in the AC when it’s hot outside and just binge a bunch of horror movies that take place during the summer months. So did this foursome satisfy my Fourth of July weekend marathon needs?

SHE CAME FROM THE WOODS (2022)

The director of Ten Minutes to Midnight takes us back to a summer camp in the 1980s with a soundtrack featuring several Kim Wilde songs. Yay!

Having said that, I found the movie is a bit all over the place and never quite settles on what it wants to be. It tosses a whole bunch of ideas into the mix, and as a result ends up giving them all less time than they deserve.

Notable is that there are a few gay situations, gay comments, and a main gay character, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

As the summer comes to a close, counselors at a camp put the kiddies on a bus and send them home. It’s then time to party! The counselors almost immediately perform a (half-hearted) ritual around a fire that supposedly resurrects a psychotic camp nurse from over 40 years ago.

This is where things get weird. The bus that left earlier in the day gets stuck on a deserted road, and the kids immediately go all Children of the Corn and run off into a cornfield.

At the same time, a camp counselor seems to go looney tunes and starts attacking the other counselors.

As the counselors try to deal with the chaos created by their peer gone wild, the kids do the resurrection spell and actually conjure the killer nurse.

Now there are man-eating kids and a nurse with an axe running around hacking people up. This is where all the fun kicks in, but I wish it didn’t come so late in the movie. If all the horror had happened earlier it would definitely make up for the fact that the supernatural plot doesn’t quite hold together.

BERMUDA ISLAND (2023)

The cliché characters in this movie are annoying at first, beginning with a bunch of mob dudes.

They end up on board a plane with everyday passengers, the plane hits bad weather, the plane crashes, and everyone ends up stranded on a deserted island, where they play Gilligan’s Island for a while.

None of that matters. Nor do the characters and their conflicts. All that matters is that 38 minutes into the movie, a bunch of mutant cavemen creatures pop out of the wild and go to town on all the castaways.

The film is loaded with the cool creatures, vicious attacks, disemboweling, and gut-munching on the beach. Wahoo!

FOREST OF DEATH (2023)

The thing with indie films like this is that they most likely won’t satisfy newer generations of horror fans that expect bigger budgets and CGI scares. This simple film is more of a throwback to the kind of low budget, direct-to-video stuff I devoured as a teen in the 80s.

It begins strong with a brief but effective home invasion scene in which the basic premise is presented—a creature takes on human form in order to lure in victims.

Next, a group of friends comes to stay at a house in the woods for the weekend.

The film runs a short 75 minutes long, but there are only 4 friends, which leads to an otherwise fun concept being drawn out. There simply aren’t enough characters to deliver enough doppelgänger action.

Having said that, there are some creepy and clever scenarios involving the body double concept, especially those in which characters catch glimpses of people they know in the beam of their flashlights in the forest. Eek!

And despite the limited number of characters, by the end of the film we do get sucked into situations in which we really don’t know who is who, which helps deliver on some suspenseful and eerie moments.

THE BLACK DEMON (2023)

Deep Blue Sea meets The Meg…or should have, if only this film had gone for the giant shark fun instead of focusing so much on the complexities of the relationships of the main family.

Veteran actor Josh Lucas plays a man who brings his wife and two kids along when he has to do an inspection of an oil rig. The plan is to leave the family in a nice oceanside town while he boats out to do his job.

Turns out the town isn’t so nice. The wife and kids have to flee some scary men and end up hitching a ride on a speedboat to go join dad.

As soon as they arrive, the shit hits the fan. Dead bodies in the water, the family stranded on the rig, a giant shark…and that’s almost the most excitement you get for a majority of the film.

The focus is more on the tension between Josh Lucas and his wife, as well as the few men who remain on the oil rig and believe the shark is some sort of sea demon that controls your mind and causes you to have delusions. And it appears that is exactly what this shark can do. Once you go with a concept like that, you really have to throw in the towel on trying to take your movie seriously, but this one clings to the towel….

It’s all so hokey there should have been more cheesy Megalodon action to strike a nice balance of bad. Especially since the acting is sooooo corny. I don’t know what happened here, but Josh Lucas in particular is horribly stiff and flat.

I would have preferred if this cutie played the lead, but he’s just a blip in the Megalodon mouth.

The Megalodon action only picks up again at the end when the plan is set in action to get off that rig once and for all. But it’s still not an exciting enough final act to make up for how bland everything before it was.

The most surprising aspect to me is that there is a very deliberate scene that makes it appear that the wife and kids are going to be followed to the rig by the unpleasant locals, which totally would have provided more food for the shark and more excitement for the audience, but it never happens. I’m convinced that was the plan, but somewhere along the way it was decided to cut that idea out of the movie. Maybe they should have cut the mind-controlling shark aspect out instead.

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BOUGHT ON BLU & 4k: more obscure 80s films

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Daniel

It’s always a treat to find 80s movies that passed me by back in the day to add to my collection. Gotta thank all the boutique labels for digging these three up. Let’s get right into them.

NIGHT SCREAMS (1987)

How awesome to be totally satisfied by a hokey slasher I never saw in the 80s. Night Screams has the distinction of running 85 minutes long because the makers were forced to insert random clips from both the 1981 slasher Graduation Day and a porno film to pad the timing (characters are actually watching them on TV). The end credits are also padded with an entire five-minute clip recap of the movie. In other words, if not padded, the film would have run a sweet 75 minutes long. In fact, there’s a bonus Blu-ray disc with the 4k release that includes an 80-minute cut without the Graduation Day/porno inserts.

The film opens perfectly, with a couple getting killed and then the killer playing “Chopsticks” on a piano. That’s how you start an 80s slasher.

The score for the film is 80s slasher music gold, as are the kills, and the film uses a classic formula…escaped mental patients! It also delivers quickly on a classic trope—locker room scene!

The great news is there’s a boys locker room seen with all the guys shirtless and in their underwear making homoerotic comments to each other, while the girls in their locker room are already fully dressed and talking about boys. Awesome.

The whole point of the plot is that the star football player is having a party for his friends. The mental patients end up at the same house. The football player has anger issues, is stressed by all the pressure to succeed, and…forgot to take his meds. Uh-oh. There are plenty of red herring here, so you’ll either have no idea who is really doing all the killing or think it was totally obvious once it’s revealed.

In true 80s fashion, there’s the equivalent of a Solid Gold dancers number as a band plays behind them, there’s club dancing, there’s a slow dance, there’s a sex scene…everything we want in our 80s slashers.

On top of that, the kills are smartly spaced apart, executed in perfect 80s slasher style, and use a variety of unique techniques to get the job done. Best of all, in the last 20 minutes they come fast and furious.

Night Screams most definitely deserves to be recognized as one of the better bad knockoff slashers that saturated the market back in the 80s.

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1988)

Hard to imagine that Roddy Piper was in this film the same year he was in the classic They Live.

In a post-nuclear war world, most men are no longer virile, but Roddy Piper is.

He’s captured, has a sort of chastity belt wrapped around his groin that shocks him when he gets horny, and is then sent on a mission with two hot babes to save and seed a bunch of women that have been captured by mutant frog people.

If only there were frog people throughout this film. The first 45 minutes are comprised of just 80s sexual excess as Roddy keeps trying to save his dick from the deep fryer as the two women with him constantly try to seduce him.

Once we meet the frog people, they abduct Roddy, and it’s like we’re transported to the cantina and Jabba’s palace on Tatooine.

Roddy tries to keep things fun and campy, but he doesn’t have much to work with beyond a frog lady he must fend off when she gets the hots for him.

The real battle with the frog people is saved for the last 20 minutes. A dull and disappointing film, it at least has that cheesy 80s vibe if you need some nostalgia.

ALIEN FROM THE ABYSS (1989)

I love me some dubbed Euro horror from the 80s. This Italian sci-fi flick comes from the director of Killer Fish and Cannibal Apocalypse. Having said that, this is disappointingly boring until way into the final act.

Two environmentalists come to investigate the practices of a facility on an island.

Turns out the facility is dumping radioactive waste into a volcano, creating a mutant creature in the process.

However, the facility baddies spend the first fifty minutes just chasing the environmentalists around the island. Yawn.

More than 50 minutes in, a small squid-like life form is discovered by some divers and proceeds to disintegrate their faces with acid. Yay!

60 minutes in, a giant claw starts chasing our heroes through the facility for a while until they finally fight back with flamethrowers and a tractor. We’ve seen it all before, but it’s still fun, and the creature looks like it’s part monster and part machine.

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TUBI ORIGINALS: vampires, a killer creature, and another visit to Amityville

Posted on June 23, 2023 by Daniel

Tubi is pumping out exclusive horror flicks, so I added a bunch of new ones to my watchlist. Here are my thoughts on the first three I checked out.

CARNIFEX (2022)

This is about us uneventful and generic as a backwoods creature feature can get. A documentary filmmaker and two conservationists head to the woods in Australia after wildfires decimate the animal population.

We spend a majority of the film watching them explore the forest and photograph a variety of nature’s species.

Something unseen kills a couple of other people here and there.

There’s more than one bogus jump scare resulting from a bird flying by.

They don’t discover the creature until an hour in.

When you brighten a screen capture for a blog post, you discover the creature is kind of cute and looks like a koala.

The environmental message is that true conservationists respect all creatures.

CAPTIVE (2023)

The opening scene of Captive features a hot jogger at night getting spooked, and it’s a clear sign that the director knows how to do horror right.

Then we meet Scout Taylor-Compton and her friends. They decide to sneak into a house and party when the owners are away. They whip out the Ouija board and almost immediately hear banging.

Turns out there’s someone chained up in the basement. Silly Ouija. Tricks are for kids.

It also turns out the house has a vampire problem….

The vampire situation gets a little romanticized for a while, but it’s great to see Scout given the opportunity to act outside of her final girl comfort zone.

It’s a bit of a slow burn until a big party in the final act turns into a vampire bonanza. This film is sleek and sexy and I had a good time with it.

THE AMITYVILLE CURSE (2023)

Considering the 1990 movie with the same title was also based on the cheesy Hans Holzer novel, you could argue that this is a remake. However, that film takes place in a random church converted into a house while this one actually takes place in the Amityville house.

This movie is a mess. A group of friends pool their resources and buy the Amityville house. The fact that two of the people were almost married and now have a contentious relationship make this concept ridiculous right from the start.

And then, after some bumps in the night and lights flickering, people just start dying left and right.

Like, to the point that the police would suspect someone in the damn house was murdering all the residents, not that they were accidents or suicides. Apparently the Amityville police aren’t very smart as far as this movie is concerned.

As the number of owners of the house dwindles, they call a ghost-hunting podcaster in, they call a reverend in too bless the house, and they call a ghostbuster in.

None of that does them any good, because in the end one of them becomes possessed and chases the others around with a sledgehammer.

Worst of all, the film sets us up for a sequel (I’ll so be watching it if it happens…).

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