There’s some seriously weird shit going on in this tripled feature of anthologies I checked out on Prime. Let’s break down Scare Me, Terror Overload, and The 4bidden Fables.
SCARE ME (2020)
This is one of the most confusing “anthology” films I’ve ever seen. To me it felt like a full-length wraparound movie with very brief campfire tales sprinkled here and there.
Along with the very 80s score, there are definitely some fun moments of horror here, plus many of the guys are cute. Even the jerks.
For a change, rather than opening with a summary of the wraparound, I’m going to begin with the stories being told since the film itself begins with a tale instead of the wraparound.
– A cult of witch babes strips a guy’s shirt off and performs a gruesome ritual. Nice gore.
– A woman’s friend in need comes over, but something isn’t quite the same about him. Creepy feel, but after the tale ends abruptly, even one of the guys at the wraparound campfire has questions.
– When an unarmed black man is shot by cops, they find out they’ve messed with the wrong black guy.
– The most delicious surprise tale of all features a guy intervening when he catches his neighbor beating and banging a gimp up the ass. It lands this one on my does the gay guy die? movie list.
– A promise of a Christmas/immigration commentary/babysitter/monster in the closet tale is interrupted…
…by the wraparound! This is a very long and confusing plot about campers and park rangers challenging each other to tell the scariest story. Thing is, when the killing began I had no idea what was actually going on and who was killing who for what reason.
TERROR OVERLOAD (2009)
When a redneck trucker picks up a blonde babe stuck on the side of the road, he figures there’s no better way to make her feel safe than to start telling her torture porn stories!
While there’s plenty of sleazy sexual situations in each of these three tales to tantalize, it truly is surprising that two of them have no real depth beyond someone being tied down, tortured, and sliced up. Not even a sense of fear or dread is established. But again, plenty of cute guys!
What an actor. Look closely. This dude is seriously digging for the taint with his fuck finger.
1st tale – a sweet guy and girl have an in-house date, but one of them turns out to be more bitter than sweet, and slices and dices the other one. The end.
2nd tale – indie horror king Marv Blauvelt does a nice job playing an arrogant, hunky boy who picks up two women in a bar. The girls have a whole different idea of fun than he does…
3rd tale – the only tale that breaks the mold here, this is a silly sexual creepozoid flick full of redneck incest.
The highlight is Ari Lehman, the original drowning young Jason Voorhees. I noticed it when Ari made an appearance in Clown Motel, and it’s more apparent here—Ari is a great comedic horror actor and totally steals the show. Not to mention, if you’ve ever wanted to see Jason’s ass, this is your chance. And it’s a cute one.
Finally, we do find out what the truck driver’s intentions are with his pretty passenger as the wraparound comes to a conclusion.
THE 4BIDDEN FABLES (2014)
You would never expect that an indie anthology could masterfully juggle beautiful cinematic artistry and some seriously dark and disgusting themes, but The 4bidden Fables does it. There were a variety of tales here, and only one didn’t do it for me at all.
1st story – a nightmarish scenario in which a mad doctor uses his expertise to create subjects for his “oddities” sideshow. Eek!
2nd story – a nasty tale of a young girl caring for her deformed sibling that her father keeps locked away in the basement.
Again, eek! And…ew!
3rd story – just too fantastical and not horror enough for me, this was a sort of metaphorical story about the power hierarchy in nature. I think. I kind of tuned out.
4th story – this is an unusual story of a man who recalls suffering the consequences of reaching the end of the rainbow…and the hell that waits there.
Each story features eloquently orchestrated scenes celebrating song, dance, and art, balanced by gory, macabre, and monstrous effects that are equally as artistic and the stuff of nightmares. The 4bidden Tales won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was mesmerized by how beautifully it is crafted.
It always feels safe to take a horror ride with the familiar, but were Blood Feast, Hell House LLC: The Abaddon Hotel, and The Gallows Act II all joyrides? Let’s find out.
BLOOD FEAST (2016)
A Herschell Gordon Lewis classic gets a remake that’s big on gory practical effects and quite stylized, but is so darn boring despite a great performance by 80s horror fave Robert Rusler.
The plot is similar to the original, only this time the psycho protagonist runs a diner with his wife (horror queen Caroline Williams) and daughter (Sophie Monk of The Hills Run Red). Herschell Gordon Lewis also makes a pointless cameo—in an internet clip.
Updating the details, Rusler goes off the deep end after he stops taking his “medication”. He starts envisioning and then worships an Egyptian Goddess, builds a shrine to her in his diner basement, and begins torturing, killing, and cannibalizing people while wearing an Egyptian mask.
The death scenes are gruesome and often sexual, but everything else about this remake drags, so it was a struggle to get through it.
The family angle was a fresh touch, but it didn’t add enough to the story to propel it forward at all. As obsessive as I am about owning all movies in franchises once I’ve started collecting them, I really can’t be bothered making room on my shelf for this one beside Blood Feast and Blood Feast 2.
HELL HOUSE LLC II: THE ABADDON HOTEL (2018)
Hell House LLC is one of few found footage films that I actually think is quite effective. While aspects of what I thought made it work are here in the sequel—same creepy setting, unnerving camera pauses and editing, cuts back to still objects to find they are now closer to the camera, etc.—part 2 takes a different approach to telling the story, and it tends to intrude on the claustrophobic suspense.
A “real or fake” debate show with a panel being interviewed by a host is the catalyst for presenting the footage. It begins with a few short and frightening clips of others who went to the boarded up Hell House location and were never seen again.
This includes one pair of guys returning from a fashion show and following a young woman into the building while repeatedly calling her “sweetie” and “honey” so that we know they simply must be gay. Although in reality no gay dude is dumb enough to follow a bitch into the cellar of a haunted building, let alone two gay dudes. Even so, this one lands on my list of does the gay guy die? movies.
It’s not until halfway through the film that the actual cast goes into the building, hoping to do yet another story about the tragedy in the first movie. This is when it feels just like the first film, including the clown. If only they wouldn’t keep inserting debate show clips in between the footage, which constantly shatters the feeling of dread.
As is often the case with movies that get sequels these days, the film tries to embellish upon and revise the history of the plot to create a larger story for, you know, the next sequel, which I’ve yet to see.
THE GALLOWS ACT II (2019)
I think I’m one of few people who really like The Gallows, and I even appreciate the different direction this sequel takes. I just wish it had clocked in at about fifteen minutes shorter, because it becomes repetitive and loses steam.
This young woman entering a new acting school longs to be famous but just can’t seem to get a bigger following on her internet video channel. Then she sees a video of someone doing The Gallows challenge—film yourself reading an excerpt from The Gallows play and see if there is some sort of supernatural attack.
She films it, she posts it, she gets hundreds more followers, she’s compelled to make more videos. And then she begins getting visions of death and hangings, along with visits from the executioner. Eek! Even the hard copy of the play she has in her possession starts to come after her.
It’s all the usual tween scares, but they’re done just right, making for a fun popcorn movie filled with chills and jump scares. Plus she has these damn creepy mannequins in her place and never turns on more lights despite a shadowy presence lurking around her home.
With many moments that feel like something from an Elm Street movie, it kind of makes sense that when she first meets her love interest, he’s wearing a red and green striped sweater.
Like I said, the movie just needed to be shorter, but I guess that would have been a challenge considering there are over 30 minutes of already deleted scenes on the Blu-ray!
I have no idea why I even bothered putting three found footage films in my watchlist, but since I did and then watched them, I share with you my brief thoughts on Devil’s Trail, Before Someone Gets Hurt, and Hinsdale House.
DEVIL’S TRAIL (2017)
Considering The Blair Witch Project disappointed me over twenty years ago after a brilliantly chilling online mythology was crafted beforehand, I can’t imagine why anyone would basically rehash most of it, but here we are with 73 more minutes of leaves on the ground, rocks, and sticks. Sigh.
Two guys head into a forest to look for the Jersey Devil. They’re experienced survivalists, so we get lots of tips for starters.
They find occult symbols made of sticks and stones. They fight over a compass. They argue over the right direction to go. They even end up in a tent they stumble upon. It so would have been worth it to blow the budget on paying Heather to make a cameo appearance in the tent.
At least this film has cheesy red monster eyes and three naked witch girls. I swear, I didn’t blur them out. It was like that in the movie.
On the bright side, the ending actually delivers a hokey surprise—there’s some actual horror!
BEFORE SOMEONE GETS HURT (2018)
I only watched this one because it stars Michael Welch of Z Nation. It pays off in that sense because he shows off his furry chest.
Other than that it’s yet another found footage film about a ghost hunting crew trying to do a show. The little wink-wink here is that they’re in talks to be picked up by SyFy…you know, the network Z Nation was on.
The film makes the smart move of not always sticking to found footage POV, but that doesn’t excuse music cues during the found footage scenes, but they definitely help with the cheap scares.
As usual, we’re subjected to a whole lot of running around in the dark. As generic as this all is, I was on board with a back story involving a cult that wants to get Satan back into heaven.
There are some creepy crucifixion elements as well, but it gets overly religious, and the plot falls apart without succeeding in clarifying why things unfold as they do.
HINSDALE HOUSE (2019)
If we’ve learned anything in the decades since The Blair Witch Project made found footage into a rubber stamp film business, it’s that its success convinced way too many people that making a scary movie is easy.
Along with the fact that I grew up on a Hinsdale Avenue, the 65-minute length lured me in to Hinsdale House. It’s unfathomable to make a movie that’s only 65 minutes long and is still painfully padded, but that’s one place this film is a success.
After a brief backstory that also summarizes The Amityville Horror (family experienced scary things and eventually abandoned the house in the 1970s), a small cast and crew goes to the infamously haunted Hinsdale house to shoot a horror movie.
Half the cast just disappears from the film with little fanfare. Unfortunately that includes the beefy boy, but at least he stuck around long enough to give us my favorite shot in the film.
The four that remain split up and run around the dark, not even knowing what they’re supposed to be afraid of.
The film doesn’t bother sticking to its goal of being found footage, as it inserts standard camera perspectives in between the found footage at a dizzying speed, thereby proving that delivering a cohesive story found footage style takes more talent than just pointing a camera. There are endless still shots of the house that are supposed to be scary because the footage flips, pixelates, and freezes. Be prepared to see a lot of this.
The climax with the final girl is a mess; it isn’t chilling and clarifies nothing since there was nothing to clarify to begin with. The poor actress is forced to just react to what she’s seeing for at least 3 minutes straight to help push the movie over the one-hour mark.
Please, please, please let the slow painful death of found footage films pick up speed.
Nico Mastorakis has been making horror films for decades, and I’ve already covered The Zero Boys, so I figured it was time to clean house and cover some of his others from back in the day. So let’s take a look at Island of Death, The Wind, and Nightmare at Noon.
ISLAND OF DEATH (1976)
Supposedly Mastorakis was inspired to quickly slap this film together just to make money after seeing Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He clearly learned nothing about what makes horror work.
For starters, the film drags with too many montage scenes featuring the absolute worst in sappy no frills 1970s ballads. Second, there is no horror atmosphere. This is an exploitation torture and murder film that takes place almost entirely in the bright sunlight of a Greek island.
You simply have to judge for yourself if the film is making a moral statement against gays, women, sex, non-whites, hippies, etc., or if it’s demonstrating that God-loving white, blond heterosexuals are the real perverse monsters.
A white blond heterosexual couple comes to stay on a Greek island, and quickly shows how perverse they are, especially the man, from making his mother listen to them fuck over the phone to fucking a goat and then killing it.
All the while the man points out all the perverts on the island that need to die because, you know, God.
The couple kills them all while photographing their work. If only they had social media back in the 1970s they would have posted that shit, gone viral, and been caught sooner.
The insanity includes terrorizing an embarrassingly stereotypical gay couple that lands this movie on my does the gay guy die? page. While one queen runs off to be chased by the man, the other is held back by the woman and lustfully sucks the barrel of her gun. Ridiculous.
A lesbian is drugged and burned, a slutty MILF is pissed on and beaten, a black detective they refer to as the n word is tied to a plane with a noose and taken for a ride, and the only apparent depth to the plot is that the woman begins to have second thoughts about what they’re doing.
For the grand finale, the man, who has a great ass, gets to feel all the pain he’s inflicted on others…along with getting ass-raped and farted on.
Yet despite all those heinous situations, I found this film boring as hell.
THE WIND (1986)
It’s quite satisfying to see Meg Foster as the femme fatale to Wings Hauser at his most psychotic, but would you believe me if I said they are both upstaged by the wind in The Wind?
Meg plays a mystery author who rents a little house on the edge of the water in an exotic location. The eccentric old man she rents it from warns her to beware the power of the winds at night and to make sure to stay inside.
The film wastes no time in getting to the point. Wings is a neighbor who pops in, acts exceptionally weird…and yet Meg still engages in a casual conversation with him about murder.
By that night, as the wind howls around the house, Meg becomes convinced Wings has murdered someone and buried them in the dirt outside. She constantly voices the running commentary of thoughts in her mind to herself as if narrating a plot of one of her novels. Soooooo…as a cat and mouse game plays out between the pair for the entire film, we are left wondering if all this shit is just in her head. Some really noticeable plot holes and inconsistencies along the way add to our doubt.
There’s plenty of suspense, atmosphere, fog, and dramatic lighting, the kind of bizarre twists you expect from Euro horror, and even a body count despite the focus being on only two characters. Plus, horror veteran Steve Railsback brings his talents to one of the best segments of the film.
But as I said before, in the end the wind is most definitely the star.
NIGHTMARE AT NOON (1988)
An 80s b-movie cast doesn’t get much better than Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins, George Kennedy, and Brion James.
Brion gets us right into the sinister sci-fi feel as an evil albino scientist dumping poison into the water in a small town as part of an experiment.
Wings Hauser and Kimberly Beck of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter are traveling in an RV. They pick up hitchhiker Bo Hopkins. They stop at a diner. A crazed patron stabs the waitress before immersing the main characters in a long chase with cars, guns, motorcycles…
Supposedly this is a sort of remake of the awesome zombie film Mutant, which also stars Hauser and Hopkins. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, just watch Mutant.
Considering the title, Nightmare at Noon takes place almost entirely in daylight, which shows how bad the green face paint is on the mere handful of infected we actually get to see. It makes the blue paint jobs in Dawn of the Dead look like good makeup.
With the semi-horror segment out of the way, the second half of the film turns into a shootout in the desert on horses between the main characters and the scientist and his goons. There’s even a damn helicopter chase.
The films in this latest trio from my Prime watchlist have one thing in common; the terror has infiltrated the house. I definitely had a favorite, so let’s look briefly at Knuckleball, Colour From The Dark, and Don’t Run.
KNUCKLEBALL (2018)
This thriller begins with an oddly rushed setup just so it can deliver a pretty darn good cat and mouse chase that lasts for about half the film.
The premise is rather absurd. A wife and husband bring their young son to stay with his grandfather at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere so they can go to a funeral. Seriously? They couldn’t find anyone to watch him back home? Especially when you take into account that the daughter has a bad relationship with her father and hates the place due to something awful that happened there in the past. Not to mention, based on the husband’s cold interaction with the son, I would have sworn he was the mother’s sleazy boyfriend, not the father of her child.
Michael Ironside is the intimidating granddad. As soon as he starts to connect with the grandson through the forced theme of throwing a baseball, he disappears from the scene, leaving the grandson alone to be terrorized by a psycho for forty-five minutes. It is enjoyable watching the grandson outwit his tormentor for a while.
There’s a rather predictable denouement revealing all the dirty family secrets, and I swear there’s a fleeting moment that makes me think one of those secrets may have been pedophilia, but the film isn’t big on hammering out details…including the ghost that I’m only now mentioning as I bring my thoughts on the film to a close.
COLOUR FROM THE DARK (2008)
The director of Herbert West: Re-Animator and Wrath of the Crows goes back to adapting Lovecraft for this film. I can’t say whether this is a faithful adaptation of the source material because I’m just not big on Lovecraft. What I can say is that while it starts off with some intriguing concepts, it ends up just another possession film.
Debbie Rochon plays a woman who lives with her husband and her sister. The sister is mute and has a special connection with a rag doll that she accidentally drops down their well.
That’s when all hell is set free from the well. It mostly affects Debbie, who begins to change so drastically they have to lock her up in a room.
Call in the exorcist. Yes, they bring in a priest and things unfold as expected–the priest and demon just can’t see eye to eye.
It’s well done, but it’s nothing new. And there’s a Nazi flashback side story that didn’t add much to the events in my opinion.
DON’T RUN (2019)
Reminiscent of the film Under The Bed, this tight little indie delivers 75 minutes of childhood trauma on a modest budget as it focuses on one teenage boy being terrorized by a monster in his room.
Walking a fine line between determined and defeated, the main kid virtually carries the entire film with his performance, as does the director’s ability to make us feel the monster is there even though we barely ever see it. And the setup is the stuff of nightmares—it’s just a given that monsters exist and the boy is at their mercy.
The boy finds a secret door at the back of his closet. He is then visited by a frightening man with a bandaged head (gave me Nightbreedflashbacks) who warns him he has to be in bed every night by sundown or awful things will happen. Worse, the man has left a monster in the house to watch him at all times.
The boy becomes a prisoner in his own home. There’s something surreal about the events that unfold and the ways in which he tries to maneuver through his new life, with demonic voices coming out of the closet and monster hands swiping at him from under the bed. I’m over fifty and still afraid that this kind of shit could happen to me.
There are some confusing moments that feel like dangling plot points, but overall this film gave me the chills, thrills, and kills I crave.
How much you’ll like The Dead Don’t Die, Abnormal Attraction, and After Party depends on whether you like your humor dry, silly, satirical, or all three…and whether you like your horror movies zombie, silly, slasher, or all three. Here’s how this trio worked out for me. Two of them even landed on my does the gay guy die? page.
THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019)
I was oddly fascinated by the director having the guts to present an overly long zombie movie using excessive dry humor delivered with agonizing gaps of silence and weighed down further by relentless running jokes that just become annoying. It feels like an unnecessarily drawn out in-joke just to get to the meta punch line.
And yet there’s loads of zombie action and gore, complete with a massive graveyard massacre, that all somehow feels like it’s going in slow motion (usually on purpose). Not to mention the cast is great, including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez, Larry Fessenden, Tilda Swinton, Selena Gomez, Carol Kane, and Iggy Pop.
I can’t fathom putting Iggy Pop in your zomcom as an actual zombie rather than making it a running joke that he isn’t a zombie but people keep mistaking him for one.
Don’t get me wrong. There were some funny moment that made me laugh, a couple of jabs at Trump racism, and even an eerily timely news report about the idea that capitalism is more important than believing science. If only the movie had done its thing in 80 minutes rather than 105.
ABNORMAL ATTRACTION (2018)
It is such a relief to just watch a stupid monster comedy reminiscent of the slapstiçk style of the 80s. Director Michael Leavy assembles a load of talented comic actors, including Leslie Easterbrook, Bruce Davison, Gilbert Gottfried, and Malcolm McDowell.
However, not even those cast members can outshine Leavy’s own brother, who is brilliantly hilarious as a Wrong Turn inbred freak type.
A hunky pretty boy runs group therapy for people that fetishize and exploit monsters. not going to lie…I myself fetishized some of the male monsters in this film.
In a world where goofy monsters and humans must coexist, the monsters are treated like second class citizens, so a grim reaper and witch want to take down the evil humans.
They end up kidnapping the pretty boy therapist even though he has good intentions, so his fiancée forms a rescue team to infiltrate their monster haven and rescue him.
Monster jokes and sex humor abound—just the way I like it—as humans and monsters confess their wacky, dirty secrets and serious problems in therapy.
The dedicated cast also features indie icons like Lesleh Donaldson, Ron Jeremy, Tyler Mane, and much to my delight a radio personality named Bethany Watson, who was my favorite on a morning show until she left it a few years ago to pursue acting.
Adding to the fun is a good dose of campy gay jokes…and plenty of man nipple.
AFTER PARTY (2017)
This is a sleek and silly slasher that definitely has a late 90s vibe. It’s a combination of some very tightly executed kill scenes and a lot of nonsense filler delivered by a bunch of bitchy characters you can’t wait to see die. It also has some humorous moments that are quite satisfying because the cast nails the comic timing.
Essentially this is a satire taking jabs at the self-made celebrity of social influencers. A group of wannabe famous pretty people is invited to a big after party at a secluded mansion.
When they arrive they discover they are the only ones there…and that they’re trapped in the mansion. Little do they know that a killer in hoodie and smiley face mask is stalking them.
In classic slasher fashion, some huge tits are flashed, but overall this is disappointingly void of sex, especially since the biggest, beariest black guy in the group turns out to be gay. There’s even a funny segment of the guys playing a gay version of fuck, marry, kill.
The real highlight here is the killer’s work. What the film lacks in suspense and scares it makes up for in its brutal, stylized death scenes. Along with a 90s vibe, the kills often bring to mind the feel of Argento, whether intentional or not.
The big payoff comes in the killer reveal and motivation. You’ll never see it coming, but it definitely makes this one so worth a watch for horror and cinema fans.
While I love the remakes of Resident Evil, I am always up for a new game in the franchise that retains classic game play elements. So in a way, Resident Evil 3make is both good and bad. While it modernizes the control mechanics, what it doesn’t give us is an overhaul of the graphics of the original PS1 game with some new areas to beef up the game, as the Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 remakes did. Other than Nemesis pursuing Jill throughout the game, this is virtually an entirely different experience. It is a lot of fun because it is all new, but there’s just too much to miss about the original game, which means I can’t help but feeling disappointed. It’s been nearly 20 years since I played my first ResidentEvil game: Nemesis. It remains my absolute favorite of the series and I was longing for an upgraded version. As it stands, this release leaves the opportunity for an actual remake along the lines of RE2 remake some day.
Obviously the game was rushed out within a year of the RE2 remake success. I would gladly have waited two or even three years if RE3make had been given the same treatment as RE2. Instead we get what feels more like a short branching game like Revelations or Operation Raccoon City. It is hard to justify the 60-dollar price tag unless you play the hell out of the bonus game Resistance, but that is only an online game. Although one person controls the baddie in this bonus game, it’s a shame they didn’t make a single player, offline version as a consolation prize for the slimmed down RE3.
Raccoon City looks entirely different in RE3make. And because this is an action game, alleys and streets don’t feel as desolate or claustrophobic. Gone are all those magnificent, cinematic camera perspectives that made the classic RE games look and feel like horror movies. There are loads of alleys and new stores to explore, as well as new characters—as well as subtle overlaps with moments from the RE2 remake. It kind of makes you wonder—did Tyrant and Nemesis ever run into each other on the street?
Of course the music score is not the same, which is as much of a blow as it was with RE2 remake. Only difference is, we were given DLC that brought back the original RE2 score, which vastly improved the experience for me. While doing the same for this sequel seemed like a no-brainer, I don’t think it’s going to happen. My heart aches for the RE3 save room music—my favorite save music in the entire series. I swear, whenever I saved in RE3make, I thought I faintly heard this melody in the background, but I don’t know if it’s really there or just a ghost in my mind.
Gone are the crows, giant worms, giant spiders (why does Capcom refuse to bring the spiders into the modern era?), the clock tower, and the biggest loss of all for me—the park. The park was so damn eerie despite those fricking snakes dropping every time you ran by the water. I’ll never forget the first time I encountered a lone zombie just swaying in the breeze on the edge of a boarded walkway in the middle of the park’s vegetation. Eek!
Most importantly, how has Nemesis changed, if at all? For starters, his “S.T.A.R.S.!” war cry is a lot less booming and ominous. There were times I could hardly hear it. On the bright side, his chases aren’t as relentless as Tyrant’s in RE2, so he doesn’t get in the way of you achieving your objective. Instead he basically chases you right to it, which triggers the end of his chase and your movement on to the next part of the game. His sudden appearances do make for some good jump scares, and this time he ends up with a heat-seeking gun that you have to avoid. Also, I discovered that if you take him down temporarily (grenade works best), he drops a suitcase you can run by and pick up (really fast before he rises). When you get to safety, check it out and you’ll find gun upgrades inside! In essence, it’s worth it to take him down every time you encounter him.
Naturally I played the game on easy, which is heavenly (because I’m your daddy and this isn’t my Resident Evil 3). The enemies go down faster (still takes quite a few shots), ammo is more plentiful, and you heal a bit automatically as you continue on. There are item boxes and typewriters in save rooms, and the greatest news is that there are no ink ribbons. You can save infinitely. There are also 20 bobbleheads hidden throughout the levels that you can shoot or slash with your knife, but all you get is a stupid trophy. Yawn.
Aside from just lying around in the open, supplies can be found in breakable crates and locked cases and lockers that you can open once you find the lock pick, which means backtracking eventually to try to remember everything you missed. Luckily the map labels items in their locations, and leaves rooms red until you’ve completed everything you can in them, at which point they turn blue. Items can also be discarded if you need to make room in inventory, but most of the time a save room is nearby, so you’re better off just running back there to dump items in the box so you can collect the new stuff to add to your arsenal. Expansion pouches can be found as you progress to give you more item slots, but unfortunately you seem to find them just as you are upgrading weapons, causing them to take up two slots rather than one. Dammit. Also, certain key items needed for specific tasks will tell you when you can discard them, but not by the text prompt we’re used to. Instead a little trashcan icon appears next to the item in your inventory. Health and ammo can be picked up as is, or you can collect gunpowder and herbs to combine in various ways to make different supplies.
Despite having the over-the-shoulder perspective rather than the old tank controls, this feels very much like RE, with a quick turn, a dodge button (that I always forgot to use), map, inventory, and reload buttons, trigger combos for aiming and shooting, and quick change weapon slots on the directional pad.
You begin the game as Jill—in her apartment! Awesome. It’s first person for this brief opening, but switches to third person as soon as all hell breaks loose and you have to go out into the city. It’s hard not to notice that Jill bears a striking resemblance to the movie franchise’s heroine Milla Jovovich in this game, especially the hair. Wonder if that was intentional.
Once you are in the city, don’t expect to know where to go, because I can’t stress enough that nothing is familiar here. There are barely any puzzles (maybe two at most that are essentially figuring out the right order in which to press buttons), so it’s mostly a run and fetch game in foreign territory. The zombies make it feel more like home, but be warned—they are really good at sneaking up on you and grabbing you. There’s an X button press opportunity to shake them off, but I have no idea if it actually ever worked, because I got a biting cinematic every single time one grabbed me. Not sure if that’s standard or if there is a pushing them away cinematic without a bite.
The game is quite clearly broken down into areas and missions. The first is to get the power going again for the subway. This is the part in which you run around the city the most. There’s an icky area in which giant cockroach things come after you, Nemesis chases you a few times, and eventually you encounter zombies with splitting faces and tentacles more reminiscent of RE4. And it wouldn’t be Resident Evil without those damn dogs, which are just as hard to target as ever.
Next is a short segment in the sewers (not complaining. I hate the sewers). No spiders, but there are these two-legged slug creatures that are one hit kills. So annoying. The game does make sure you score a grenade launcher to deal with most of these—after you’ve already been eaten by the first one in one big gulp.
Once you get to the police station it’s hard not to notice that the terror you felt when you first played the original RE2 and RE3 returns because you know how scary the police station is. Encountering lickers in narrow halls alone brings on that feeling of dread. Sadly, this segment is super short and only has you do a few things in one wing of the police station, and you don’t get to access any of the areas that were closed off in RE2 remake. WTF? Oh, and most importantly, you play the whole section as Carlos, not Jill. Don’t you just hate when you’ve spent half a game building up your inventory only to wake up as a different character with no damn supplies? Although I’d be glad to wake up as Carlos any day.
Next, it’s a new area, and the most expansive section in the game. You’re at a hospital! This is when you finally encounter Hunters for the first time. You’re still playing as Carlos, and his segment ends with a damn protection challenge. Zombies pour in through windows and you have to fight them off for a certain amount of time—in which Hunters eventually join in on the fun. Argh! I used up absolutely every last bit of ammo I had and just made it through this challenge. Once Carlos has done all the work, you’re Jill again and can just run around the hospital collecting everything you missed as Carlos.
You then move on to an underground facility. It’s quite a maze of stairs and lifts, and the goal is to find three fuses. A new raw mutant zombie you meet takes more bullets than regular zombies, but it’s still not that hard to kill (on easy).
It’s a shock when you at last reach “The Nest” to find it’s the absolute smallest damn lab you’ve ever encountered in a Resident Evil game. It’s a very straightforward final mission to make a serum, there’s a central save room, and the branching hallways don’t go very far. It seriously feels like this game was super rushed.
Finally there are two boss battles with save rooms in between each. The first boss requires a lot of ammo, not only to kill the boss but also to take down the damn zombies that show up to make things annoying. The final boss is virtually not a battle. You do have to hit the pulsing sacks on the boss a few times to put him out for a moment while you charge a massive gun, but it’s a quick task and then you end the game with a blast or two of the super charged weapon. It’s hard not to feel unsatisfied as the credits role. You know playing the game again will bring no surprises, but I do know one thing that would make it worth a replay: the original music as DLC.
Once you complete the game you open up a shop where you can buy items for a second play through, using points you earned by accomplishing certain tasks in the game. As far as I’m concerned, unless the shop sells the original soundtrack…who cares?
It took three platforms—Prime, Showtime, and Hulu—but I at last hit a quarantine high with big killer spider fun, a nasty infected remake with plenty of hunky bodies, and a slasher sequel with a gay lead character. Let’s see what I loved about Itsy Bitsy, Rabid, and Pooka Lives!
ITSY BITSY (2019)
Sometimes I just need a creepy-crawly movie to make me itch, and this simple little spider flick does the trick. It’s definitely the new yet familiar horror comfort food I crave right now.
A classic slow burn in which we know the spider is lurking around much longer than the family it is terrorizing realizes it, Itsy Bitsy is a fairly predictable formula for those of us who have been around since last millennium (for instance, we just know what’s going to happen to the cat).
We get a little voodoo ritual action at the beginning to explain why a big spider is crawling around the house of Bruce Davison, whose horror resume dates back to starring in the original 1971 Willard! There’s just enough spider goddess myth to get the web spinning.
Bruce is ill, so a home nurse comes with her two children to live with him. The nurse has experienced something traumatic and is a mess, and unfortunately that makes her character totally unlikable. Also floating around is Denise Crosby of the original Pet Sematary as the sheriff.
Much of the horror elements revolve around the little daughter exploring the house and having close calls with the spider. It’s all very cliché…because it works every time.
The final half hour is when the spider action really kicks in, and what makes this one so good is that the ample gore and spider goo are all practical effects. None of that CGI crap.
RABID (2019)
Adding to their horror filmography of an original (American Mary) and a sequel (See No Evil 2), the Soska Sisters take on a remake: David Cronenberg’s 1977 infection film Rabid.
For me, this is their best work yet. It modernizes the basic premise of the original and delivers a look and feel that is a great throwback to sleazy, gory VHS horror of the late 80s.
A rather boring, wannabe fashion designer gets horribly disfigured in an accident. She is given free, experimental facial reconstruction and looks even better than before.
But the drugs and protein drinks she must take after the surgery have troubling side effects; she hallucinates that she’s seducing and gruesomely killing and eating sexy men.
She might think they’re hallucinations and nightmares, but we know better. Anyone bitten begin to spread the infection, which causes monstrous deformities.
This wild midnight movie has it all: gore, practical effects and makeup, a cameo by the Soska Sisters, a juicy man-on-man kissing session, hot man bods, and a major, monster-filled climax. I ordered the Blu-ray before I even finished watching the film on cable.
POOKA LIVES! (2020)
The director of Juan of the Dead revives one of many ultimately disappointing installments of Into the Dark, not only breathing new life into it, but possibly creating a worthwhile franchise that needs to escape the Into the Dark label.
While the original Pooka was a Christmas installment, the sequel squeezes in a one-liner sarcastically referring to Pooka as an Easter bunny to justify his resurrection in an April installment.
But it doesn’t even matter that it’s not really a holiday horror film. Pooka Lives! goes from being a dark and violent slasher to a initially jarring but inevitably satisfying horror comedy with a Buffy vibe.
Wil Wheaton has a cameo in the opener, then we meet our group of thirty-somethings. That’s right—a slasher that’s not about teens or college kids. Awesome.
The group of friends includes a black copywriter and his black love interest/co-worker (that’s right…two black characters), a married couple (including Felicia Day of Supernatural fame), and a gay sheriff (that’s right…a gay sheriff).
So the friends create a Pooka challenge that goes viral, and it turns out anyone who does the challenge is hunted down and killed by a version of Pooka. That’s the awesome slasher part.
Once the five friends realize what’s happening and decide they have to stop it, the goofy comedy fun begins. It’s perhaps a little too “quaint” at times, but it is also loads of fun. Not to mention, the best one-liner comes when the gay sheriff steps in to play the hero.
That makes two films in this single blog that land on my does the gay guy die? page.
When I see neon in a horror movie poster, I have high hopes for some silly throwback horror fun. Did this selection from my watchlist–The Happy House, 1 Must Die, and Distiller–deliver?
DISTILLER (2016)
This one looks and feels like a Full Moon movie from the early 90s. Unfortunately, it’s simply not as much dumb fun as a Full Moon flick until the last 20 minutes or so.
It begins with a ghost hunter that captures spirits in bottles of liquor. This unnecessarily long opening segment even manages to throw in a Bigfoot.
25 years later a girl and her boyfriend come to her missing uncle’s house to throw a Fourth of July party. Other than pouring out all the old “spirits” from bottles they find in the house, the couple does absolutely nothing of any interest for a majority of the film. I was so damn bored.
At last a variety of little monstrous creatures comes out to play when all the friends arrive for the party—which you’d think would lead to a body count. NOPE.
There are also a lot of floating ghost heads joining in for the big fireworks show, but there is absolutely no glue holding this mess together. But hey, it does land on my holiday horror page.
THE HAPPY HOUSE (2013)
The description of this film has some great potential, so I can’t wrap my head around how horribly it falls apart about halfway through.
A young, bickering couple decides to vacation at a charming B&B, where the girl quickly becomes suspect of the owners—a sweet old lady and her creepy, beefy son.
The old lady has a “three strikes you’re out” policy if guests don’t follow her rule book, which includes things like no profanity. Her son lurks around with an axe, so the girl fears what might happen after the third strike.
If only that suspicion led somewhere. The guests sit around talking a lot, then a cop drops by to tell everyone a psycho has escaped, and then…a dude shows up with a gun. Yawn!
Would you believe me if I said **SPOILER** the rest of the movie is basically the guests all hiding from the killer and talking until they find an opportunity to sneak out a window? WTF?
1 MUST FALL (2018)
1 Must Fall starts with some satisfactory gore, which drew me in even though the killer is just some bald dude.
The film takes place in the 80s, but the decade is not crucial to the plot, and the 80s vibe isn’t overplayed. The plot focuses on a woman who gets fired from her job then takes a temp job with a crime scene cleanup crew.
Turns out the killer is still in the building in which they’re working. The crew includes the usual suspects—a jerk, a witchy woman, a gay guy (who plays a crucial role in the film by the end), the cute love interest, etc.
While there’s some quirky dialogue, this isn’t a laugh riot…although it does try to inject humor with a completely pointless cameo by Lloyd Kaufman (aren’t they all pointless?). The film is disappointingly slow with too much talking, but when the killer finally starts slaughtering everyone, the gore is great. It’s also the only thing that really saves this otherwise mundane movie.
Let’s make this triple feature quick. Here are my thoughts on Blood Myth, High Moon, and Marla.
BLOOD MYTH (2019)
If I wanted to be bored to tears by a film in which a several people go to a small town to interview locals about a creepy legend that we never see, I would have just rewatched The Blair Witch Project.
There really isn’t much to say about Blood Myth. A journalist and his pregnant fiancée travel to a small town and speak with people who claim to have gotten glimpses of a mythical being believed to be responsible for disappearance for ages. But don’t expect The Mothman Prophecies.
The fiancée goes missing, and the journalist spends the rest of the movie questioning unhelpful people to find out what became of her.
Nothing much happens until the last few minutes when he locates the fiancée. The brief, occult segment has some gore and killing but feels mostly like a no budget, straight-to-video flick of the eighties.
HIGH MOON (2019)
I assumed I knew what I was getting from a movie about a cowboy that comes back from the dead to finish off the gang of wolfmen outlaws he fought in the 1800s. The hubba hubba and I were expecting a silly werewolf action flick, but we just didn’t get enough of the silliness, the werewolves, or the action.
The film stars sexy horror daddy Matthew Tompkins (The Harrowing, Phobia) as a sheriff in a small town, where a very rare murder case coincides with the return of the sexy cowboy, who looks damn good for a dead guy.
The wolfmen outlaws become a biker gang (absurdly awesome), and we get some early wolfmen attacks (yummy blood and gore), but then the film comes to a screeching halt.
There is way too much talking and too much character development as the sheriff deals with relationship drama. It’s a fricking movie about a resurrected cowboy fighting a werewolf biker gang! Just get to it already!
The film takes itself way too seriously considering the premise, so sadly it’s not as much fun as it should be. The werewolf action scenes are definitely a blast, they’re just few and far between.
MARLA (2019)
The director of this film is also the lead, and while I appreciate what she was going for here, any veteran horror fan watching this film is going to see it as a grimmer, darker version of the movie Teeth.
A young woman gets an IUD birth control device inserted by a doctor who is also a distant relative (ew!). As soon as she has sex after that, she discovers it causes any guy inside her to literally explode.
Rather than having her taking full advantage of fucking guys to death just for the fun of it, the film focuses more on her grief and determination to get rid of the IUD, giving this a sort of body horror vibe.
She spends most of the movie determining why her doctor relative won’t remove the IUD. Yes, it’s long and plodding, but the…um…climax is quite satisfying. With its zinger ending, I think perhaps it all just would have worked better if this were a short film in an anthology rather than a full-length feature.
