Quick looks at modern horror time killers 13

Fairy tale horror, torture porn, a creature feature, a home invasion, and demons. I blast through five flicks that all have something going for them.

BLACK FOREST (2012)

Black Forest is like a horror/fantasy film, so don’t expect a scary horror movie. A group of people basically gets trapped in an enchanted forest and must fight off a bunch of evil versions of classic fairy tales, which is a pretty cool premise. There are the seven dwarves, the witch from Hansel and Gretel, a big bad wolf, and more. Plus, the leading man, Dhaffer L’Abidine, is quite handsome.

CAPTIVITY (2007)

You can protest all you want about the term “torture porn,” but it just fits so well sometimes. Raise your hand, Captivity…if it hasn’t been hacked off yet.

Awesome Elisha Cuthbert of the House of Wax and the TV show Happy Endings is a model who gets kidnapped from a dance club, wakes up in a dungeon cave, and is repeatedly tortured by a creep in a mask. And she eventually makes contact with another prisoner, played by cutie Daniel Gillies of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals.

Some of the torture is mind fucks. After being forced to watch videos of other people being tortured, Elisha finds herself in the same position, about to suffer the same fate. But then the killer is like, “PSYCHE!” She is forced to drink a gross body part smoothie through a funnel. She is forced to choose between having a shotgun blow out her brains or that of a little dog. Fucking dog torture porn. Fuck you, Captivity.

But it’s still kind of good….

SPLINTER (2008)

Splinter is a fantastic creature feature that stars Kate Argent of Teen Wolf. The tight plot is what makes movies like this fricking rule. A couple is carjacked in the backwoods by another couple. After a run-in with some reanimated road kill, they stop at a gas station convenience store and are soon trapped inside because there is a horrific oozing, spiked monster thing waiting to gobble them up outside. Essentially, it’s the Blob with splinters. And when it gets you, you become part of it.

Gory, gross, and scary, Splinter is a deliciously heinous monster movie. This thing becomes the shape of the last person it ate and moves all jerky, almost like the person is still in there in agonizing pain, trying to get out. Fricking love this movie.

TORMENT (2013)

If you love films like The Strangers and You’re Next and love to see Katharine Isabelle kick ass, you’ll probably really get into Torment, despite the pretty inconclusive ending that tries to explain what the home invasion was all about but only partially accomplishes that goal.

So Katharine, her new hubby, played by Robin Dunne (of fricking Teenage Space Vampires, which I just blogged about here), and their son come to a family vacation home in the middle of nowhere to discover someone has been living there, leaving bug-ridden food and blood behind. So of course…they stay. So it’s hard not to blame the victim when creeps in stuffed animal masks break in and start tormenting and torturing them! But it does make for one thrilling horror film. Just be prepared for that crappy ending.

THE DAMNED (aka: Gallows Hill) (2013)

The Damned is kind of like a kinder, gentler Evil Dead remake. Peter Facinelli of the Twilight series and Nurse 3D (who looks dang good shirtless at the beginning of this movie) stars. He, his wife, his daughter, and a couple of her friends get caught in a landslide and beg an old man to let them in out of the rain. He reluctantly agrees, but tells them not to leave one particular room.

Leaving the room as soon as possible, they find a little girl locked up in the basement, crying. So they release her. The Damned is pretty darn predictable and cliché, with an evil spirit hopping from one person’s body to the next, but it really does become fun by the end, with people going all deadite-lite. I only have one problem with flicks like this, in which the demon uses the characters’ secrets against them—why is it that everyone has done something absolutely awful?