A ghost town, a haunted abortion clinic, and a lesbian couple’s evil baby in this trio of films I streamed on Tubi.
TEARDROP (2022)
This movie sets itself up in a promising way—a teacher brings some of his students on a field trip to a ghost town.
However, once they arrive and are helped at the inn by a creepy man who is so obviously from the past, it kind of seemed pointless to me for this movie to go on.
But go on it does. It drags on and on until the first true scary ghost appears an hour in!
The characters have a few run-ins with some people not of this time, mostly a submissive girl who is also so obviously from the past (although she could be mistaken as coming from the near future if conservative extremists have their way in the U.S.).
The students also have a few strange, creepy encounters that are written off as the result of indulging in weed and liquor. Lot of good all that does the audience as we wait in boredom for this ghost story to take off.
Eventually a few people die and a flashback plot about the gallows comes into play, but I simply was not drawn into any of this.
HARLAND MANOR (2021)
Harland Manor gets credit for wrapping its ghost plot around a very timely subject a year before that subject blew up in our faces—abortion. If only the movie had delivered on anything else it would have been a delicious horror movie to piss off the anti-woke crowd.
A small team of ghost hunters—3 guys, 1 girl—comes to an old mansion with an attached hospital to learn of its ghostly history.
That ghostly history? The man who owned the place did secret abortions on women in the basement when it was illegal, mostly for the mistresses of rich white men. He also had his way with young women put under his care.
Let me tell you, we get loads of exposition about this. We also get plenty of love triangle shit as two guys on the team battle over the girl on the team. Complicating that even further, the girl has a very personal investment in the treatment of young pregnant women.
There’s plenty of roaming around the building in the dark—way too dark. The film only occasionally opts for a “found footage” POV, but considering you can’t see shit on screen, I would have welcomed a found footage camera POV with night vision.
So what about ghosts? Aside from some lame shadows and drawers opening on their own and things like that, we don’t get an actual ghost attack until…nearly 70 minutes into the movie!
At that point, this turns into a possession film. A young female victim of the original owner is out to get revenge on any man she can, because all men are scum.
UNBORN (2022)
Sure, Unborn is yet another “What’s wrong with my baby?” movie in the tradition of Rosemary’s Baby, but if you’re okay with all the clichés, the difference here is that the expectant couple is a pair of lesbians.
And that’s about it. Some minor details make this demonic pregnancy different, but the plot is the usual: pregnant woman starts to suspect her fetus is something supernatural, no one believes her, pretty much everyone is actually in on welcoming her demon spawn into the world.
This being about pregnancy, there are a few notable statements made about the way women are treated when they’re pregnant, to the point that the pregnant lesbian even says she feels like she’s being treated not like a person but an incubator. I see a theme running through these Tubi originals.
The most fun for me was that anyone that falls under the spell of her pregnancy eventually gets a case of demon eyes for a few minutes, but don’t expect to be scared out of your wits by anything this film has to offer.
