From mysterious monsters in the pipes to yet another killer shark, I take on a variety of creature discomforts, starting with weird sounds coming from behind the walls.
PIPELINE (2020)
This indie film really has the best of intentions on what is clearly a very limited budget, which is why the pretty cool horror opener makes the rest of the film a letdown.
The first scene establishes that a couple is renting a house simply to feed something that’s living in the pipes (it eats the tenant through the washing machine. Clean and delicious).
Then we meet a bunch of friends heading to a music festival—and staying at a rental place. Uh-oh.
The acting and dialogue are definitely not the best here, and a good chunk of this film drags as these kids just do a lot of talking and a lot of free advertising for red Solo cups.
Then one girl takes a bath, and we wait and wait for a monster to get her. In the meantime, another girl gets trapped in a room and everyone goes looking for her.
There are splashes of blood and puddles of blood, plenty of dark mood lighting and shadows, a creepy silhouette of a gnarly hand reaching for someone, a person getting dragged away by something—but that’s the extent of the thrills you’re going to get when there’s no budget to actually show a monster.
Instead the movie focuses more on the bad humans in the film rather than the bad monster. Blah.
BUTCHERS (2020)
If you love backwoods horror flicks with sleazy psycho hillbillies abducting kids that make a wrong turn to feed them to something living in a barn, no matter how formulaic it is, then you should definitely check out this nasty little flick.
To me it felt like the creators came up with an ending and decided their backwoods horror flick would be different than all the rest because of the ending…and so they made a film just like all the rest to tack their unexpected ending on.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because as a pro-Wrong Turner, I was quite satisfied with the strong performances, the grit, the tension, the violence and gore, and the bleak ending. The only major disappointment for me was that the mutant in the barn is literally unleashed and seen for the first time with only two minutes left in the film.
What a shame, because it’s a face only a Wrong Turn family and backwoods horror movie camera could love.
JUNGLE RUN (2021)
Not only do I keep going back for more terrible nature strikes back flicks, but I subject the hubby to them when I do. I just put him through two in one weekend, and now I’ll put you through them in this post.
It’s not even ironic that Jungle Run, one of the selections I streamed, is the kind of movie SyFy should be playing on a weekend, while SyFy was once again showing the fucking Harry Potter movies. Ugh. It’s just not fair to Richard Grieco, who appears at the beginning and the end of this movie because he’s the “star”.
Meanwhile, the whole movie is carried by a brother and sister who come to the Amazon looking for their father, along with their guides, the majority of which are hunky and cute.
This group faces CGI frogs, piranha, alligators, giant spiders, anacondas, and even tribal natives (not CGI), and yet not one of them dies for the entire movie.
Only in the final act do some of the main characters suddenly become wild animal food. Oh…there’s also a goofy supernatural walking around for a few minutes.
It’s bad. It’s really bad.
GREAT WHITE (2021)
It’s getting harder and harder to be forgiving of the dumb fucking things the main characters do in the numerous shark movies that come out these days. Great White had me groaning basically from the first to the final decision.
The film stars Katrina Bowden, aka: Cerie from 30 Rock, who has built a substantial horror movie resume as well. She, her man, and their buddy give seaplane tours. A young rich couple hires them, they land on a deserted island, they find a dead body eaten by a shark…and Katrina’s man concludes they have to go search for the dead body’s boat because there might still be a woman on board based on a photo on the dead body’s phone.
This is the moment when we’re supposed to think the rich guy is a total douche bag that deserves to die because he insists they just get the hell out of there, but somehow, whoever wrote this film managed to make me totally side with him. Here’s why.
Katrina’s man calls the coastguard to inform them of the situation. Katrina’s man was hired for services by this rich guy. Katrina’s man has a responsibility to keep him and his lady safe. Katrina’s man should not take it upon himself to force them to go on a rescue mission for a woman that may or may not be alive in the middle of the ocean when he knows there was a shark attack and the coastguard is already on the way. I wanted everyone in the movie to die except the privileged rich guy considering he was RIGHT.
I also think the privileged rich guy is the only one who has seen Jaws 2, because he clearly knows exactly what’s going to happen after a series of very Jaws 2 events lands them in a very Jaws 2 predicament on a very Jaws 2 raft boat.
And then we hit the slow spot as they paddle and talk for a while…because chum deserves character development, too?
More stupid moves abound, like a man sitting by as his pregnant woman goes into the water to rescue an oar that has drifted away. Really, this movie annoyed the fuck out of me, and it just gets worse as it progresses.
On the bright side, the shark does just knock all the fuckers off the boat at the one-hour mark to finally get some action going for the last thirty minutes. Not to say that it’s not stupid as fuck action loaded with stupid as fuck and totally unrealistic decisions—including the man now letting his pregnant woman go deep dive shark hunting—but at least it’s action. Plus, Jaws 2 makes its presence known again near the end, as does Deep Blue Sea, maybe a little Jaws 3, maybe I’ve seen way too many shark movies…
