My latest triple feature focuses on girls with traumatic pasts and troubled presents. Let’s see if any of them were worth a watch.
THE COMMUNION GIRL (2022)
I think as we get older we just reach a point when every horror movie is a “been there done that” situation. This Spanish film from the director of The Damned and Hellraiser: Revelations had me saying “why would they just steal blatantly from The Ring/Ringu and call it a new movie?” Well, maybe because Ringu came out like 25 years ago and many younger horror lovers probably don’t even know it exists.
Not to say that this isn’t fun. It’s definitely a templated throwback to all those PG-13 ghost girl movies of the early 2000s, so if you loved that era, The Communion Girl totally delivers on the retro comfort.
The film takes place in the 80s, but the only real sign of it being the 80s is a Bubble Bobble arcade game. Two teenage girls go out to party at a club, and on the way home they and the two guys that give them a ride see a girl in a white dress cross their path. When they get out to look for her, they find a hung dog (don’t know why this needed to be in the movie) and a doll.
The main girl brings the doll home, and soon she and her friends are being terrorized by a ghost girl corpse in white.
To keep the pace going, there are some cheap scary scenes (which I find to be a treat in a horror movie) as the friends do what they always do in these movies…start gathering clues to what has triggered this ghost to come for them.
Would you believe it all leads to a well? The final confrontation is straight out of The Ring. And would you believe it isn’t over after they do what needs to be done with the ghost girl in the well? That’s where this one really falls apart. The final scene is not one last return of the ghost girl. Instead, it’s the sudden appearance of a CGI ghoul that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings movies, without any explanation as to what it is or why it shows up at the last moment. Sigh.
PERPETRATOR (2023)
Yet another reminder of why I should cancel Shudder. If it’s not an endless selection of trauma porn, it’s movies that are hardly horror.
I like a good feminist flick just as much as the next gay, but this one is loaded with menstrual and fingering imagery that overshadows the story of young women finding power to fight back against the threat of a male abductor. Which is a shame, because it starts with a girl being stalked on a nighttime street by mask eyehole POV. That left me wanting so much more. Unfortunately, there’s no more of that horror goodness to be had…
Instead we get a tale I didn’t understand. A teen comes to live with her mysterious aunt, played by Alicia Silverstone, and goes to a new all-girls school with a bizarre staff. Girls begin to go missing.
The main girl starts to show signs of having some sort of magic powers. She can see and feel what girls that have been kidnapped are going through. She hooks up with another girl. And eventually she and her friends try to figure out who is abducting their classmates.
Other than a scene of what happens to the girls in the kidnapper’s lair and a vengeful gore moment, this is just bland and boring.
THE PUPPETMAN (2023)
The horror genre is just dismal these days. Here is yet another derivative film that’s been done better before and offers absolutely no chills or thrills.
A young woman’s father is on death row for killing her mother. He claims “the puppetman” made him do it and he’s innocent.
Once the main girl’s friends learn about her family’s past, they begin dying off by killing themselves, but it’s clear someone is controlling their actions and making them do it.
The friends must work together to try to figure out what’s going on. The main girl thinks her own anger is causing their deaths. The friends think death row daddy is the problem.
Michael Pare of Eddie & The Cruisers fame is a detective on the case.
The final frame “twist” is as predictable as it gets.
That’s all I got.
