I made the hubby sit through all three of these with me, and for what it’s worth, he thought two out of three were pretty good.
MERMAID ISLE (2019)
Director Jason Mills hooked me with some of his earlier horror films, which I even purchased on DVD, but I haven’t been captivated by his later stuff. Mermaid Isle is a bizarre film that only runs 70 minutes long, has loads of filler consisting of characters just walking through the woods, and feels kind of like an incomplete script.
We jump right in with four people arriving on a deserted island. Apparently one guy brought them there to propose to his woman.
They miss the big sign that warns them not to swim in the lake, so one girl gets pushed in and then gets bit by something…in water a few inches deep.
Is there supposed to be a mermaid in the lake or is it something else that carries a mermaid virus? Because it seems like that’s what is going on here.
The wounded girl feels sick, so they look for shelter in a house the come upon. An old lady living there warns them at gunpoint that the wounded girl needs to die or she will kill all of them. They think the old lady is crazy. The old lady keeps repeating her warning and even says, “You don’t understand!” Problem is, she never explains it to them!
Don’t expect anything to be clarified. My guess is that the wounded girl was bitten by a mermaid (not sure how a mermaid was hiding in five inches of water), and just like a zombie virus, she then turns into a mermaid. But if it is a mermaid bite and not something else in the water, what becomes of the initial mermaid that bit her? I have no idea.
We do see one character that gets bit slowly crawling towards the water while turning green in the face, and there is a character splashing around in the water with fins, but that’s it. No other mermaid action. The old lady’s son, who also seems to know what is going on in the water (then why the hell do they continue to live there?) shows up, and then everyone dies with little fanfare.
During the closing credits, we see that another group of people has come to the island a few months later, but there’s no horror pay-off to watching them roam through the woods for a few minutes. WTF? Why was this old lady living alone on an island with a killer mermaid in the water? Why didn’t her son get her the hell off that island long ago? Is she supposed to be like the guardian of the lake? If people come to this island and die, why do people keep coming? How do they even find out about this island? If people keep getting turned into mermaids, wouldn’t there be a lake full of mermaids? Yeah, this one really feels underdeveloped.
ALL EYES (2022)
This is such a bizarre and quirky movie that kept my attention despite being slow-paced.
It opens strong, with a cute podcaster who speaks with strange people who do weird things losing his job after something tragic happens while he’s broadcasting live.
He then gets a request to come to an isolated farm by an old man who claims there’s a monster living in the woods that he wants to capture. The time they spend together staking out the property for the beast’s arrival has a whimsical charm to it, and the old man is a hoot.
There’s plenty of eerie blue and red horror lighting but be warned—things don’t kick into high gear until the last 25 minutes of the movie.
Booby traps the old man has set backfire big time, which becomes one of the brutal highlights of the film, and also a bigger threat than the beast, which we finally see fleetingly near the end of the film.
My one disappointment is that after all the anticipation about the beast, it’s all over and done with way too fast. My favorite part is that the main guy spends the final act shirtless, and his bod is tight.
FLIGHT 7500 (2014)
Somehow this one passed me by a decade ago, which is surprising since it has such a great cast of horror veterans, including Leslie Bibb, Scout Taylor-Compton, Amy Smart, Ryan Kwanten, and Johnathon Schaech.
We meet a cast of characters boarding a fairly empty plane, and we learn of each of their quirks and flaws—some bordering on sinful if you want to be totally judgmental in a Biblical sense. The flight experiences some turbulence, and then things take a weird turn.
One guy has some sort of attack and dies. They move the body to an empty part of the plane. There’s more turbulence, and the plane temporarily fills with some sort of smoke. Soon, passengers start to go missing…and so does the dead body. There are also what seem like attacks by something that comes out of temporary and smaller scale returns of the smoke. It’s like The Fog on a plane, but don’t expect to ever see what’s in the smoke.
There’s even a freaky as fuck, moving doll that they find in the belongings of the guy that died, but that plot element never takes off. Bummer.
Something supernatural seems to be going on, and it’s compelling enough to keep you watching, plus the atmosphere is spooky and often very dark. However, there aren’t tons of thrilling moments with any pay-off, and the turn the film takes at the end is one that might seem unique to newbies, but it was being used quite often at around the time this movie came out, so I wasn’t blown away by the clever conclusion like some might be (including my hubby).
