It’s a handful of films I checked out on Prime with connections to films I’ve blogged about in the past (sequels, same directors, etc.), so let’s see if it was worth coming back for more.
NAVY SEALS V DEMONS (2017)
I didn’t love Navy Seals vs. Zombies, but at least it had enough going for it to entice me to check out this companion film. Perhaps the goal was to spark a Navy Seals vs. series of horror movies, but I hope someone thought better of it after they went through with making and releasing this disaster.
Even worse, I lured the hubba hubba into watching this one with the promise of muscle hunks and demon battle action scenes.
Leading man Mikal Vega is a stud (he was also in Navy Seals vs. Zombies as a different character), but his pretty face and bod are about all this mess has going for it.
I don’t know if this film is supposed to appeal to the middle of the country, but it’s about a navy seal assigned to go to a small Bible-thumping town to stop illegal Mexicans from being killed by demons, because no one else really cares.
He assembles a small group of tough guys, they jump on motorcycles and head to the town, they get into it with some of the locals, they stop at a strip joint, our hunky lead gets a lap dance, and the stripper calls him a faggot because he doesn’t seem that into it…ugh.
A priest shows up and tells them he’s protecting the female virgins in town from the demons. The demons? We don’t see what they look like for a majority of the film because they are in motorcycle gear and helmets. WTF with this movie?
Seriously, nothing happens and the film draaaaaaaaaags.
Finally, at the end, there are some lame demon battles and the few demons there are look pretty cool for a low budget film. Seriously, if you’re going to make a movie called Navy Seals v Demons and you have some muscular dudes and some cool demon makeup, just fucking give us muscular dudes fighting demons for 90 minutes. That’s all we expected. That’s all we wanted. Well, that and Mikal Vega shirtless…especially considering I couldn’t even find a picture of him shirtless on the Internet.
DEAD VOICES (2020)
You’d think coming from the director of Demonic Toys 2 and Gingerdead Man 3 it would at least be stupid fun. Instead, this is a found footage film that does all the same boring as fuck things found footage films have been doing since The Blair Witch Project created all the most boring fucking things a found footage film can do.
Two sisters are making a documentary on psychic mediums, because one of the sisters dumped her boyfriend right before he went to war in Iraq, where he was reported dead. She wants to know what happened to him, so they put and ad in the paper, meet a medium, and take him to a cabin in the woods to find answers. Because a cabin in the woods in The U.S. is exactly where you would find answers to what happened to your boyfriend who died in Iraq.
I mean, why even bother going on? They run around the cabin a lot, they run around the woods a lot, they find evidence of satanic worship, the medium acts weird, one of the sisters stars acting weird.
Find footage clichés include someone panning over a sleeping character with the camera, the camera dropping to the ground and someone being dragged off screen, and someone standing in a corner with their back to the camera. I guess the big reveal of what happened to the boyfriend is at least different if not absurd.
BAD NUN 2: DEADLY VOWS (2019)
Director Scott Jeffrey keeps pumping them out, and I keep coming back for more. The Bad Nun was perhaps one of my faves of his, so I was psyched for this sequel that he co-directs with Rebecca Matthews (The Candy Witch, Pet Graveyard), which captures the spirit of the first film perfectly.
The main girl from the original even comes back for the opening scene (yay!), which is awesome and suspenseful.
Then we meet a new, all-female family that moves into an isolated house in a small town…and immediately gets visited by the nun. Once again she comes at night, knocking on the door, asking to come in…and leaves a nasty housewarming gift. Ew!
The ladies of the house (one of them even a lesbian) delve into the story of the nun, which gives us some good backstory, and you have to love the all-female household parallels to a nunnery.
Along with a more embellished plot, the horror atmosphere is quite creepy, with the nun essentially giving the family The Strangers treatment. I would definitely come back for more if the bad nun comes back for a third film.
HELLKAT (2021)
The Bad Nun 2 directing team joins forces again for a redemption martial arts monster movie about a former female fighter who has hit rock bottom and decides to get into the ring to prove her worthiness.
After an initial demonic creature surprise, the film does tend to wallow in the main woman’s self-pity for quite a while as she hangs with and fends off a bunch of lowlifes before finally accepting the offer to fight from a deliciously devious villain.
Naturally, everything is not as simple as it seems for her, but as her story unfolds in the second half of the film, this becomes more of an action horror flick drenched in red light as men, women, and monsters fight it out like something out of a 1990s Mortal Kombat video game. These types of movies have become a bit of a thing in the last few years, and some cool monsters aside, they’re not my thing personally.
