Stream Queen 5: a mish mosh of subgenres

When you’ve streamed every other horror movie out there, are any of these four worth a watch? I take a look.

CROWSNEST (2012)

Another one to throw on the “everything that’s wrong with found footage horror” pile. Therefore, I shall spoil the hell out of it and spare you the trouble of sitting through it.

• Obnoxious voyeuristic dick never puts down the camera.
• Group of friends will not shut the fuck up or stop bickering as they head to a cabin getaway.
• One chick starts preaching about the Bible. Why the fuck did they invite her?
• They see a bloody skeleton on a backwoods road in the middle of nowhere, so they stop to investigate.

• Dick still filming.
• Seeing a bloody skeleton doesn’t stop them from following hand-written signs promising “cold beer.”
• They get to a ghost town and see a scary girl and an old man who warns them to turn back. So they keep going.
• An RV almost runs one of the girls over during a rest stop…so they chase the RV down a desolate road.

• Dick still filming.
• RV terrorizes them, but seems to disappear and reappear instantly. Is it a ghost RV? Not that we ever learn.
• RV runs one of them over.
• Dick still filming.
• They all split up in the woods.
• Dick still filming when he finds one of the girls tied to a table in the RV, surrounded by sharp tools. Sees little girl eating a person, beats her with camera, continues filming.

• Dick chased through woods by two cannibal men. These barbarians decide taking his camera to film is just as important as eating. They chop off his head. YAY!
• Two surviving friends find the camera. Start filming, making the excuse of getting footage to prove what these crazies are doing to them.
• They spend tons of time hiding in bushes filming. They finally get into car, RV crashes into them. The end.
• Scary.

SPLATTER (2009)

I really can’t explain the existence of this short film by Gremlins director Joe Dante. From what I understand, it was a streaming only series, sort of. Apparently viewers got to pick who was going to die in each 10-minute episode, and that somehow extended it into a series. Here, it’s just 30 minutes long and everyone dies. So I guess it was…um…a mini-series.

Anyway, this could easily be a campy, gory episode of Tales from the Crypt. Corey Feldman is a dead rocker who has invited a small group of people to his funeral at a castle. He happens to come back in undead form and takes care of them himself. Tony Todd appears as the “final guy.” The film has a short, abrupt ending. I’d say it’s worth a watch just for the novelty.

THE TALL MAN (2012)

It’s not about the guy from Phantasm, and it’s not about Slender Man, although
it does promise a similar urban legend. In a small town, children have been disappearing, and stories revolve around a man in black taking them. Awesome.

Jessica Biel stars as a woman who becomes personally interested in The Tall Man when he kidnaps her son! The first part of this film promises a pretty terrifying movie. Biel sees The Tall Man taking her kid then chases him—on foot—and latches onto his truck! This wickedly suspenseful scene is very Jeepers Creepers, and leads to Biel trapped temporarily in a very Saw-esque setting.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the terror ends. Truth is, The Tall Man isn’t really a horror movie. There’s a pretty cool twist…but it’s one that turns this into a drama instead of a scary film. Bummer.

Keep an eye out for creepy horror girl Jodelle Ferland of Silent Hill.

LAST SHIFT (2014)

Last Shift reminds me of a cross between Room 6 (blog here) and Nightwatch (blog here).

Strikingly pretty Juliana Harkavy, who had a very short life as a lesbian on The Walking Dead, plays a rookie cop assigned to be the lone watcher of an old police station on its last night of operation.

Turns out there was a major police massacre at the station, involving some sort of creepy cult. Beginning with a freaky homeless man coming into the station and pissing on the floor, Juliana begins to experience increasingly more frightening situations. Shit gets seriously supernatural. This is a slow burner, and you spend much of the time wondering why the hell she doesn’t just get out of there. Naturally, when she eventually tries to, something won’t let her….

The last half hour or so of this film is uber scary, with Juliana—who carries the whole movie herself—being terrorized by hellish creatures that you might see crawling around Silent Hill! Last Shift isn’t going to win any originality awards in terms of plot, but it’s frightfully good fun with eerie atmosphere and some fantastic visual horror stimulation. I may need to add this one to my movie collection.