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.

 

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Zombie horror caught live on body cams

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.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on TUBI TERRORS: water zombies, a backwoods cult, and a supernatural slasher

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?

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Creatures, creeps, and ghosts

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.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Living in the 80s - forever, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, Sound Check - The Songs Stuck in My Head, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on STREAM QUEEN: summer scares

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.

Posted in Living in the 80s - forever, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on BOUGHT ON BLU & 4k: more obscure 80s films

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…).

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on TUBI ORIGINALS: vampires, a killer creature, and another visit to Amityville

BOUGHT ON BLU: The 40s, the 60s, the 80s

Posted on June 22, 2023 by Daniel

My latest trio of purchases all happen to come from decades that were 20 years apart, and it was a satisfying shopping spree.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Believe it or not, I had never seen the original Cat People, but now that I have it makes me appreciate the sleazy 1982 version I grew up with more. This is a plot that needed an R rating, nudity, blood…and Lynn Lowry picking up a chunk of panther cum. The original is sterile with the sexual themes and more heavy on the religion.

Running only 73 minutes long, it is a tightly paced flick that relies heavily on making you use your imagination to fill in the scary blanks.

A Serbian artist drawing a black panther at the zoo meets a handsome man. They date, they marry…and then she refuses to have sex with him for fear doing so will ignite her family’s cat people curse.

The husband tries to be patient, even sends her to a psychiatrist, but she seems to become more and more convinced she’s going to turn into a pretty kitty.

That’s when a coworker of the husband, who admits she’s in love with him, begins being terrorized by something lurking in the shadows and snarling. This is the best part of the film, from a scene of the coworker walking to a bus stop at night to a scene in which she is surrounded by shadows and growls of a panther while alone in an indoor public pool at night.

And that is what makes this film work. The frightening scenes use light, sound, and editing to great effect. Even so, by the final attack scene, you start to feel like you’re being humored with shadow puppets.

If you want full nastiness or gruesome black panther attacks, you’ll need to stick with the remake, but this is a fascinating watch to compare how different a sexually-themed horror plot was handled twenty years apart.

THE STRANGLER (1964)

In the wake of Psycho, mama’s boy killers carved out an entire horror subgenre, and The Strangler isn’t subtle about it at all. Victor Buono plays the perfect creep in this one. He’s quiet, unassuming, and obsessed with spying on half-naked women, choking them to death, and leaving a baby doll as his calling card.

While there are slasher elements here (including some great killer POV), this is mostly one of those portrait of a serial killer films. What we don’t learn about Buono from the police investigation (he hates women), we learn from his overbearing, bed-ridden mother (she hates him).

Mother doesn’t hold back, and she’s worse than Mrs. Bates. She tells Buono he’s fat, ugly, poor, and will never land a woman and that she’s the only woman who will ever love him.

Which begs the question…why doesn’t he just kill her?

The spooky 60s-style horror music is perfect, but as with all movies that are mostly presented from the killer’s perspective, this isn’t particularly scary. However, many elements were most definitely used as a template for horror films that came after this one, and I’m sure it was unnerving to audiences back in 64 because it’s inspired by the true serial crimes of The Boston Strangler.

SILENT RAGE (1982)

The director of horror spoof National Lampoon’s Class Reunion brings us a movie that could have been a better horror flick than it is. All he had to do was cut out about twenty minutes of Chuck Norris as a sheriff who, along with his goofy deputy, waste a lot of time bickering with a biker gang.

That’s what causes this otherwise intense film to be totally inconsistent. So let’s virtually ignore Norris and get to the good stuff.

In the opening scene, a mentally ill man hacks up a couple in their home. Actor Brian Libby, who has been in various horror movies and Stephen King adaptations over the years, is perfectly freaky as the killer.

Norris’s men end up shooting the killer, but pretty soon some mad doctors use an experimental drug on him that revives him and makes him indestructible.

If only we didn’t have to wait 50 minutes for him to go on his killing spree. However, when he does, we get some super atmospheric and suspenseful chase scenes and body reveals, all of which give us great performances by late actor Ron Silver (as a doctor) and veteran actress Toni Kalem (as Ron’s sister and Chuck’s love interest).

Not to mention, the horror score and music cues are tight.

And speaking of music, Katey Sagal is the singer of the love theme that plays during a Norris sex scene.

And speaking of Norris even though I wish I didn’t have to, he finally gets involved with the actual storyline in the last act for a satisfyingly lengthy chase and fight scene with the killer.

Posted in Living in the 80s - forever, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on BOUGHT ON BLU: The 40s, the 60s, the 80s

When bachelor parties go wrong

Posted on June 21, 2023 by Daniel

One is a straight bachelor party, the other a gay bachelor party. Let’s find out if either of these bashes was a blast.

PARTY BUS (2022)

 

Imagine the Saw confessional killing subgenre on a bus and you get Party Bus.

It all begins at a club, where the bachelor’s ex comes seeking closure, only to get swept up on his party bus before she can talk to him.

But before the bus action begins, there’s a gory massacre at the club during the opening credits. I think a drug is causing people to go psycho, but I’m not sure. This murder montage feels disconnected from the rest of the film. Even so, I wasn’t disappointed that it’s included.

When the bachelor’s brother crashes his celebration, things quickly turn dark and violent. The brother does some drugs and then demands the guests reveal their darkest secrets otherwise he will slaughter them.

And slaughter them he does—beginning with a nasty scene involving an unborn baby. This is a crass, nasty film that should satisfy exploitation fans.

The only thing that hinders the severity of the brutality is an odd audio issue. It felt to me like sound effects are missing, creating pockets of silence whenever any frenetic action takes place. For instance, someone will fall to the floor, but there’s no impact sound. Even so, the gratuitous violence and torturous kills deliver.

SUMMONING SYLVIA (2023)

Here’s one for the homo horror movies page. The humor in this gay ghost comedy may have been “cute” like twenty years ago, but for me most of it felt so cringe in its attempt at camp. This style of cliché gay shtick has been done to death, and even the name-dropping of gay icons is embarrassingly outdated. Some of the comedy works perfectly, but I found it gets drowned out by loads of predictable, over-the-top silliness.

Imagine a gay bachelor party where Ariana Grande’s brother Frankie Grande is one of the guests and the other three gays all think they’re equally as fierce and fabulous as him. Without any nuanced differentiation between characters, it gets…shrill to say the least. This vacation house film full of flamboyant gay men who all want to be the center of attention lacks any sense of balance. Instead of always being turned up to full volume frenetic, the comedy would have worked better with varying levels of tone and delivery.

Frankie and friends have a séance to summon a woman who was accused of murdering her son with an axe in the house years before. Yay!

Then the straight military brother of one of the grooms shows up. When lights begin flickering and there are mysterious bumps in the night, the gays run around screaming, squealing, and clinging to each other, while the straight guy stomps around unfazed and stony-faced. Sigh. This is why there are only gays in my Comfort Cove series of books, and all of them, from pretty boys to bears to drag queens, are always prepared to stand up to the creatures of the night.

There are a few twists, and horror fans may feel a little bamboozled when all is said and done. I know I did. I came looking for a gay horror comedy, not an episode of Scooby Doo.

Some of the gay happenings in the film include Frankie in an energetic sex scene, a dance montage, the straight guy making an accusation about predatory gay behavior (sigh), the queens singing Smashmouth’s “All Star” a cappella, and a grand finale featuring an extravagant and jarringly out of place drag performance.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, Sound Check - The Songs Stuck in My Head, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on When bachelor parties go wrong

HULU HORRORS: they want female bodies…and what’s inside them

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Daniel

I cleared out my Hulu watchlist with this trio of films that all revolve around women and their bodies. Let’s get right into them.

Clock (2023)

The problem with so much elevated horror, aka: trauma porn, aka: stuff that’s usually found exclusively on Shudder but somehow found its way onto Hulu this time, is that in its effort to be smart and thought-provoking, often it completely loses focus. Of course the other issue is that it’s rarely worthy of the horror genre.

This feminist film perfectly captures the horror of being a woman pressured by everyone around her to have a baby even when she’s totally fulfilled without one. But in the end it’s just a confusing Stepford Wives/Rosemary’s Baby concept with a bogus boogey woman, a nod to the movie Teeth, lots of spider imagery, and some nasty birthing and fetus visuals.

Quinn from Glee plays the happy motherless wife, but she eventually caves and does everything she can to get her biological clock ticking. Adding to her mental state is the pressure from her father, a man of Jewish faith.

Quinn decides to voluntarily check into an unorthodox pregnancy clinic that is supposed to have great success with breaking through stubborn uteruses.

And that’s when Quinn begins pretty much losing her mind and living in a stress-induced world of delusions. Sure there’s plenty of disturbing body horror that will most likely traumatize females specifically, but the film makes sure to give males reason to grab their crotches protectively as well.

SHE WILL (2021)

Watching this movie is like taking a women’s studies class with a Wiccan lesson thrown in for good measure. It’s all about female empowerment, bodily autonomy, and Mother Earth…and it makes little use of the familiar names in the cast.

Horror queen Alice Krige plays an aging actress who has had a double mastectomy. She goes on a country retreat with her nurse, who she treats horribly.

The retreat is run by Rupert Everett, but his presence is irrelevant.

Alice starts having dreams of dancing around fires in the woods with other women. She acquires the power to harm shitty men. In an underdeveloped plot line, she seeks revenge on Malcolm McDowell, a famous director who had a questionable relationship with her when she was a child actress. The decision to make this storyline understated could be so as not to feed into the energy of it, which would take the control away from the female perspective. Did that assessment make me sound smart?

We get repeated witchy imagery in the woods, a few more men get harmed, Alice makes amends with her nurse, demonstrating that women need to lift each other up, Alice comes to accept her flawed body, and Alice finally goes to finish what she started with Malcolm—who is essentially playing the slime ball his Dr. Loomis character became in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

Bottom line—this is essentially an art house film with witchcraft subtext.

THE OFFERING (2022)

As basic and filled with cheap scares as this one is, it’s totally horror with an awesome demon, and it’s my favorite of this bunch. In other words, I liked it because it’s basic and filled with cheap scares.

The focus is on a man and his pregnant wife coming to stay with his Hasidic father, who runs and lives in a Jewish funeral home.

After the father and son work together on a corpse that comes in, the wife begins experiencing unnerving situations in the house.

Unfortunately, the scares begin with a dream sequence. Ugh. You need to prepare for those types of cheap scares, because they are what you get here.

Which is why the freaky demon is so satisfying…it’s more substantial than the predictably timed noises and orchestral stingers that bombard us.

It’s a classic template as the couple delves into the strange occurrences, which are all steeped in Jewish occult themes. And of course the goal is to save their unborn child. It might be predictable, but the battle with the beast is loads of fun, and there’s even a scene reminiscent of the Elm Street 4 looping moment.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on HULU HORRORS: they want female bodies…and what’s inside them

BOUGHT ON BLU: vengeful ghost children of the past

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Daniel

It’s been decades since I’ve seen the latest additions to my collection. Conveniently, they make a perfect double feature because the plots are similar, and they remind us that angry ghost children have been haunting horror for years.

THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (1977)

Based on an early Peter Straub novel, this film starring Mia Farrow is disappointing–it’s disjointed, uneventful, and open-ended with nothing in the way of scares or even bone-chilling atmosphere. The “haunting” could almost be seen as more of a metaphor about guilt rather than an actual haunting. It’s up to the viewer’s interpretation.

Mia’s daughter dies in a tragic accident. It almost seems like Mia tries to take matters in her own hands to save her daughter before help can arrive, but we are left not knowing what really happened, and we never find out.

In the aftermath, Mia literally just runs away from her husband (the actor who played Peter in the original Black Christmas) and moves into a house on her own.

Mia soon starts catching glimpses of her daughter wherever she goes. She hears noises in the house. She makes a gruesome and random discovery in a park. She participates in a seance.

Mia decides to delve into the house’s history and visits various people connected to its past. The best part of the movie is a disturbing backstory of girl who grew up there, but unfortunately it’s only presented in a monologue by a character Mia chats with, not through flashbacks.

The trippy final scene is meant to be haunting…but is it real or just in Mia’s messed up mind? We’ll never know.

THE CHANGELING (1980)

Revisiting this slow burn for the first time since watching it on HBO back in the early 80s, I braced myself for the agonizing overacting that George C. Scott brings to his performances–the kind that made Exorcist III even more laughable than it already was.

Imagine my surprise to find his performance here is actually understated and realistic. In fact, this whole movie, with its classic bump in the night ghost story vibe, was the more enjoyable of these two similar features.

After a tragic accident kills his wife and daughter, Scott, who plays a composer, moves into an empty old house to work through his grief.

Along with lots of atmospheric panning shots of the house, we get banging at night, a door opening on its own, running water, weird noises, lights flickering, a ball rolling around the house, and a padlocked door Scott can’t resist opening. This kicks off an investigation into the house’s history. And considering it’s 1980, that means microfiche! And naturally, a seance is also obligatory.

Best of all, this film has a body in a well/ghostly revenge plot that predated Ringu/The Ring by two decades–minus a terrifying, angry spirit we can actually see. This one uses the classic notion that “it’s what you can’t see that’s scariest”.

The backstory behind the haunting is a goodie that takes us to places that still seem original over 40 years later, and the creepy highlight is a chase scene involving a wheelchair. Eek!

Posted in Everyday I Read the Book: Literary Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on BOUGHT ON BLU: vengeful ghost children of the past